Lecce 1984

Lives in Amsterdam

Choreographer and dancer Michele Rizzo combines dance and sculpture, exploring the relationships between materiality and movement.

For the first time in Rizzo’s practice, the two media merge in the work REST (2020), an installation made up of four performative moments beginning outside the Palace. Four sculptures of bodies resting on small stretcher-like structures are placed inside the room on decorated fabrics, immersed in a landscape of light and sound. The choreography, which echoes the rituality of religious processions in southern Italy, lingers on the ritual and para-religious aspect of clubbing, creating a short circuit with the museum space and its status as a ‘temple of art’. The idea of resting – which is what ravers do after dancing until dawn – is linked to the physical restrictions required by the months of lockdown, but it can also be linked to the social unrest that has raged in several cities in support of the protests of the Black Live Matters movement. Therefore, the work carries with it also an invitation to take charge of the protection of others.