Falling on the Past

Valentina Karga, Jacopo Miliani

Falling on the Past unfolds as a collective, embodied exploration that brings the artistic practices of Valentina Karga and Jacopo Miliani, creating a space in which Ancestral imagination and bodily experience come together. The afternoon begins with an introduction to Karga’s research, through her video work Prehistoric Posthumans: A video storytelling, which opens the workshop with a reflection on the ancestral past as a space of possibility and healing. Participants are then invited to a practical session of cutting and shaping fabrics, drawing inspiration from prehistoric figurines. This process transforms the act of making into a collective gesture, establishing an initial connection between body, material and ancestral forms. This phase is followed by a collective reading that links the two practices.

The workshop then shifts towards Miliani’s performative approach. Through a series of guided exercises, participants engage with the act of falling as a repetitive and transformative gesture. The fabrics created earlier become the surface onto which bodies fall, introducing a tension between protection and risk, control and surrender. Falling is explored here as a means of altering perception. Throughout the process, verbal language gradually recedes, making way for forms of non-verbal communication and a shared physical experience. The workshop thus becomes a space for experimenting with alternative modes of relating, between participants, materials and imagined ancestral presences.

Limited places available; registration required no later than three days before the event by writing to: iscrizione@lungomare.org

Valentina Karga

Valentina Karga is an artist born in Chalkidiki, a peninsula in northern Greece. Her work lies at the intersection of art, design, architecture and research, weaving together socially and speculative experiments that challenge existing social and in the fields of energy, the economy and sustainability. She was a fellow at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Science at the Berlin University of the Arts Berlin, a Saari Fellow in Finland, and held residencies at NTU-CCA in Singapore and at the Vilém Flusser programme at Transmediale in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited . From 2018 to 2024, she was a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HfbK), where she developed projects with her students that were exhibited at documenta fifteen in Kassel and at Somerset House in London. She is currently a professor at the HfG Karlsruhe. She lives in Berlin.

Jacopo Miliani

Jacopo Miliani is an artist whose practice treats performance as an aimed at investigating the connections between linguistic construction and corporeality. He lives in Milan and is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and at Università Iuav di Venezia. In 2021 and 2024, he co-directed MATCH, a festival dedicated to performance at the Museo Novecento in Florence. He has exhibited internationally, collaborating with performers such as Jacopo Jenna, Antonio Torres, divaD, Benjamin Milan, Mathieu LaDurée, Eve Stainton, Annamaria Ajmone, Sara Leghissa and Marco Mazzoni. His work currently focuses on the relationship between dance, the body and cinema.