event
Saturday 12 March 2016 ore 11:30 - 13:30

The Histories of Art.On the principles of performative composition | Seminar with Virgilio Sieni

MAXXI Auditorium – admittance €5.00; admittance to 5 seminars €20.00; free for myMAXXI card holders. The purchase of a ticket allows for reduced price museum entrance (€8.00) within one week of issue.

Five seminars with international philosophers, composers, artists, choreographers and writers to explore and comprehend the expressive idioms of contemporary creativity.

In dance, understood as the quintessence of every form of scenic posture, what is composed is the body. In this the second seminar, the discussion shifts to “interrogations of the vertebrae”, a recurrent expression in the titles of Virgilio Sieni. On the stage the body interrogates its limits, redefines its functions, is obliged to invent itself – thus subtracting itself from the slavery of habits, tasks, roles. As Giorgio Agamben has written, “we experience our faculties only at the point in which something obstructs and impedes them” – as in composition that is, always, a “de-limitation of our faculties: “it is actually and only when something shuts our mouth that we realise what it means to speak”.

Virgilio Sieni is one of the protagonists of European contemporary dance. In 2013 he was appointed director of the Venice Biennale – Dance Sector and was invested as a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et de lettres by the French minister of culture.

The Histories of Art. On the principles of composition
13 February – 21 May 2016

Now returning in its fourth edition, The Histories of Art is a series of seminars dedicated to the history of contemporary art from 1960 to the present day, organized according to chronological and thematic issues dealing with the last 40 years of artistic research and production. The seminars are led by critics, gallerists, curators, artists and university lecturers.
Introductions by Andrea Cortellessa.