WORKSHOP PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Teatro Continuo Burri | Triennale Milano | 14 Giugno 2026 | H 20:45

Il gruppo artistico si sviluppa nell'ambito dei Laboratori e dei corsi di Arti Performative, Regia, Drammaturgia Multimediale a cura di Loredana Putignani, attivi da un ventennio all'Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, unisce diversi mondi, corrode i confini disciplinari, generando nuove geografie possibili.

La proposta di fare un allestimento a costo zero, diventa atto necessario in questo oggi. Uno sforzo di allontanarsi dallo spreco, evitando di appesantire il pianeta e per far respirare la terra, riscattando lo spazio del corpo come tempio. Lo spazio Burri diventa così luogo di Rifugio, zona relazionale con coloro che lo abitano ogni giorno, di cui noi ospiti non rappresentativi condividiamo le difficoltà.

Attraverso una pratica multiforme legata ai fondamenti di un fare | stare al presente, curando una concezione artistica basata su un atto trasformativo, oltre le rappresentazioni numerico mercificanti a cui siamo relegati: dal mantra AI, alle criticità che emergono da una dimensione sullo status di ‘umano e non…

Come in ‘Vite di Scarto’ una serie di eventi performativo/visuali, generato con 33 giovani artisti provenienti da tutto il mondo, passato anche alla Triennale e in altri spazi non solo milanesi; prosegue le pratiche sperimentali da Grotowskij a Leo de Berardinis, da Neiwiller a Kantor in dialogo con le genealogie che ricompongono il nostro nuovo mondo plurilingue, riattivando fonti antropologico-rituali originarie, dell’esser/esistenza corporea.

Una partitura processuale con una radicale attenzione allo scambio: un corpo di lavoro che rileva visioni nomadi, includendo lo sconosciuto:::Andare sul suo terreno ::: Captando i suoni dei multilinguaggi che nascono per necessità, nello spazio creato da Burri, oggi divenuto luogo magnetico espanso dell' alterità.

Il percorso si avvale dei Performance Studies come preparazione del Terreno corporeo, articolando diverse forme di resistenza. Un allenamento costante, nel ritmo dell'eterno ritorno di un conflitto dualistico in cui si macera un pezzo di infinito. Una pratica trasformativa dei detriti comportamentali, contro l'inerzia della parola e per il de-condizionamento dall’abituale colonialismo digitale.

Attraverso differenti media e linguaggi rivoluziona le arti visive e le reti di comunicazione, contaminandole con un linguaggio iconico, in una dimensione organica corporea/incorporea. Un processo evolutivo che fa decantare qualcosa sepolto, che torna ad esser forma.

A cura di Loredana Putignani & Artist/Alliev* di diverse SCUOLE dell’ACCADEMIA BELLE ARTI BRERA

Corsi ARTI PERFORMATIVE | REGIA | DRAMMATURGIA MULTIMEDIALE

Gabriele Randaccio | Chen Wentai | Alice Bertolasi | Simone Fumagalli | Shuman Yao | Lu Xi | Zhang Linfeng | Erika Puccianti | Edoardo Peli | Vanessa Tahiri | Lan Yue |

Mao Chengyumeng | Sound performing Zeviz Zyberi

WORKSHOP

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents A Photographer, an Art Collector, and the Exciting Discovery of Color Reproductions: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Freer, and the Autochrome in 1909, led by Anne McCauley, Visiting Scholar and David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University.

On January 25, 1909, the New York art critic Charles Caffin approached Charles Freer with a proposal to have the celebrated photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, come to Detroit to make color slides of about forty Whistlers in Freer’s collection for a planned lecture. What began as an experiment in the use of the new autochrome process, only marketed in 1907, ended up as a twelve-day marathon during which the two men–vastly different in age and wealth–shared an obsession with Asian art, the technical problems of producing accurate reproductions, and their shared belief in a ‘spiritual unity’ of Eastern and Western cultures, a concept rooted in early twentieth-century cross-cultural discourse. This talk will center on the surviving autochromes, as well as other photographs that Coburn produced on this occasion, and why their creation inspired such outpourings of mutual excitement and friendship. 

Visiting Scholar: Anne McCauley, David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University, has published extensively on XIX and early XX century photography, including A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph; Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-71; The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz (co-authored); and Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (co-curated and co-authored). In 2017 she was the curator and primary author of Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. She is currently writing a book on Alvin Langdon Coburn and the evolution during World War I of the  vortographs, often described as the ‘world’s first abstract photographs’.

Participants: The seminar is open to doctoral candidates, as well as to students currently enrolled in second-level academic diploma programs, master’s degree programs, and second-level master’s programs. Non-doctoral students may attend as auditors.

For information and registration: iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it

WORKSHOP

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents Disorienting the Gaze, Rewriting the Minor Archive, an intensive educational workshop led by Nicola Lo Calzo, Visiting Scholar and Italian photographer, curator, and researcher (CY-ENSAPC).

Building on Nicola Lo Calzo’s doctoral research, Une photographie queer et marronne. Représenter les mémoires de l’esclavage à l’ère postcoloniale (CY Cergy Paris Université / École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, 2025), the workshop mobilizes queer studies in order to develop a critical and denormative photographic practice. Its aim is to interrogate photography’s capacity to produce queer and denormative representations of the memories of subaltern groups and subjectivities, while also deconstructing the hegemonic imaginaries that shape them, thereby contributing to the construction of a minor archive.

The first day is structured around two distinct yet complementary case studies. Through an approach that intertwines aesthetics, ethics, and critical thought, the workshop presents fieldwork conducted in Brazil centered on the memorial practice of Nego Fugido. The exhibition of the same name is presented at the National Museum of the Republic in Brasília (2025) and subsequently at the Museu Afro-Brasileiro of the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador (2025–2026). Particular attention is devoted to the different stages involved in the development of the project, from research to production, from the use of archives to modes of dissemination.

The workshop then introduces the project Brigantinas, recently published by L’Artiere (2025), which, within a different geographical context marked by equally structural power relations, investigates the role of women in the (de)construction of Sardinian identity and memory. Particular attention is given to the reactivation and resignification of archival and museum collections as tools for a decolonial artistic practice.

The second day is devoted to the presentation and discussion of students’ work, building on the reflections developed during the workshop and the case studies introduced during the first day.

Visiting Scholar: Nicola Lo Calzo (Turin, 1979) is an Italian photographer, curator, and researcher (CY-ENSAPC). His work focuses on memory, identity, and marginality in postcolonial contexts. His long-term research explores the ways in which communities preserve or reactivate their cultural memory in the face of processes of marginalization and historical erasure. Since 2010, he has been developing Cham/Kam, a photographic investigation into the legacy of slavery and resistance across the Atlantic world, from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. Lo Calzo’s work is grounded in a participatory and field-based research practice developed in collaboration with local communities, historians, and institutions. His work is exhibited internationally and published in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Le Monde, Libération, Internazionale, and National Geographic. Alongside his photographic practice, he is active in academic and curatorial contexts, articulating visual storytelling, colonial history, memory politics, and queer and decolonial thought.

Participants: The workshop is open to doctoral candidates as well as students currently enrolled in second-level academic diploma programs, master’s degree programs, and second-level master’s programs.

For information and registration: iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it

DOCTORAL WORKSHOP 

What does it mean to think about photography today? This question frames Thinking Photography: New Strands in Photo Research, a five-day doctoral workshop that will take place at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, from 16 to 20 March 2026. The workshop brings together three international visiting scholars—Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen), Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University, Leicester), and Martin Jürgens (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)—for an intensive programme of seminars, discussions, and collaborative working sessions.

Coordinated by Nicoletta Leonardi and Maria Chiara Palandri and conceived as a collective laboratory, Thinking Photography reflects on the methodological transformations currently reshaping photographic studies.

Across five days, the programme develops four interconnected research strands:

Photobooks as sites where aesthetics, politics, and social functions converge. Moving beyond national or stylistic canons, this trend focuses on photobooks’ social uses, examining how photographs acquire meaning within editorial, institutional, and ideological frameworks. It rereads questions of aesthetics and politics from a perspective reframed and enriched by social function.

Business and economic histories of photography. Drawing on industrial archives and business records, this strand explores photography as a technological and commercial enterprise, addressing the infrastructures, labour, and economies that have shaped photographic production and circulation.

Personal and family photographs as sources for writing photographic history. Focusing on private collections, this strand reflects on the methodological and ethical challenges of constructing historical narratives from family archives, considering both the possibilities and the pitfalls of working with intimate, personal materials.

Quantity and Significance in Photographic History. Using the case of etched daguerreotypes, this strand investigates how databases, statistical analysis, and the notion of “critical mass” can inform historical interpretation, raising questions about the relationship between quantity, use, value, and historical significance.

Thinking Photography includes visits to the collections of the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology, the Civico Archivio Fotografico, and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

Through these perspectives, the workshop addresses photography as an intermedial and institutional phenomenon, whose histories are produced at the intersection of images, objects, technologies, archives, markets, and social practices. The aim is not only to present new case studies, but also to reflect critically on the epistemological frameworks through which photographic history is written today.

The initiative is part of the PNRR project INTAFAM IartNET – an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions, led by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Mission 4.

Visiting Scholars: 

Martin Jürgens is conservator of photographs at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Before moving to the Netherlands, he worked as a conservator in private practice in Hamburg. His education includes a German diploma in photography and design, an M.S. from Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.A. in Paper Conservation from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Following a scholarship at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute published his book The Digital Print. Identification and Preservation in 2009. He is currently a part-time PhD student at the Photographic History Research Centre of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

Steffen Siegel has taught as professor of theory and history of photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen since 2015, where he also directs the master’s and PhD programs on the theory and history of photography. Since 2024, he has served as Chair of the Board of the Center for Photography Essen. During the 2019/2020 academic year, he was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In the fall semester of 2024, he taught as Max Kade Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. 

Kelley Wilder is Professor Emerita and former Director, Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Kelley gained a BA from Kenyon College in 1993 in Studio Art and English Literature, and in 1995 graduated from the George Eastman House with a Certificate in Photographic Preservation and Archives Practice. Before beginning her doctorate, Kelley worked at the Paul Strand Archive (NY), the Maine Photographic Workshops, the Aultman Museum (CO) and Photo-Eye Books and Prints (NM) while learning platinum printing, albumen printing and daguerreotyping. In 2003, she gained a D.Phil. from Oxford University with a dissertation on the invention of photography and went on to a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, working with Director Lorraine Daston. Kelley Wilder’s research ranges over the breadth of photography, science, materials, archives and knowledge, with numerous articles and books to her name. 

Participants: 

Open to doctoral students of the Brera Academy, and to a limited number of external participants upon request, Thinking Photography is conceived as a moment of international and interdisciplinary exchange.