MuSa is the space-time in which Sara Manente and Muna Mussie meet to interweave their practices, desires and obsessions, bringing manual activities closer to those of the body and performance. Their understanding is based on trust and emphasises the richness that comes from their differences rather than communalities. The project is made up of practices, techniques and experiments they have realised in the past and mixed with what is new in the rural context: wicker weaving or embroidery reflect on digital languages and artificial intelligence.
TRANSPERFORMARS is the name the MuSa project adopts in its development in Ameno, focusing on the discovery of the wheel and how it comes alive and becomes autonomous. In a performative installation, it is interpreted as the invention of the coil, which can generate electrical charges through a system of windings. Knotted threads, shafts and stems form ropes, nets and embroidery. Morse code, a gnashing of teeth that becomes a sonorous biting text in the distant past. Morse re-sounds with Mars, a future anterior that speaks in a synthetic voice using a digestive, degenerating filter. We manifest an instrument to activate a transmission, a transistor that collects and emits, a reporter that reproduces and generates form, a trans-form-a(u)tore (author) -a(t)tore (actor), a trans-former.
Concept and creation: Muna Mussie e Sara Manente | Performers: Muna Mussie e Sara Manente | Sound: Matteo Nobile | Materials: Scuola di Intreccio – Borgo Creativo Polcenigo and gruppo Cestaie e Cestai Italiani | Project supported by: BUDA (Kortrijk), Nadine (Brussels) e VCG – Flemish Community Commission.
BIO
Muna Mussie is a multidisciplinary artist based in Bologna. Her work moves between gesture, vision and word, traversed by the practice of embroidery. She investigates the languages of the stage and performing arts to shape the tension between different poles of expression, the private and the public, the visible and the invisible, memory and oblivion. Recent performances and installations include The Perfect Human from Sunrise to Sunshine (2023), Oblio/Pianto del Muro (2022), PERSONA (2022), FORO FORO (2022), Her work has been presented in various national and international contexts including Fondazione Sandretto (Turin), Hangar Bicocca (Milan), MAMbo (Bologna), Santarcangelo Festival, Archive Books (Milan), SAVVY contemporary (Berlin), Short Theatre and Il Mattatoio (Rome), Manifesta 2020 (Marseille), Workspace (Brussels). Muna Mussie is among the winners of MiC’s Italian Council 2022.
Sara Manente graduated in Communication in Bologna with a thesis on the semiotics of dance, then she moved to Brussels where she now works as an artist and researcher. Drawing on living imaginaries and subject matter, her most recent projects reflect on the possibility of contamination between pedagogy, research, performance and publication, resulting in a variety of formats: from the choreographic and sculptural work of MOLD, which considers shaping and contaminating as logics of the body, to the editorial and curatorial practice of ROT, magazines and Gardens. Together with Sébastien Tripod and Debora Robbiano he collaborates on RUINED and Towards a Ruined Theatre, a process of mycological construction and degradation that iterates the idea of fertile ruin in different architectures. The situations she promotes are highly collaborative and often emerge from long-term research such as Wicked technologies/Wild Fermentation (from 2019) and Spectacles (2016-2018). In 2021 she was artist-in-residence in Wiels (Brussels). She has been part of a.pass since 2008, as a post-master’s program participant and research center, as well as a curator and mentor. She has taught at KASK, ISAC, ZUYD, DOCH and EXERCE. She has collaborated with Marcos Simoes in performances and workshops. Her projects are funded by Flemish authorities in Belgium and have been exhibited in Europe, Brazil and Korea.
Ph. credits Paolo Sacchi, Muna Mussie and Sara Manente
