Resistenze e Metabolizzazion Residency

This is my first residency in Melpignano. I arrive without the accumulated grammar of previous visits — no muscle memory of the space, no shortcuts, no already-negotiated relationship with the territory. Only the unfamiliar, which is both the difficulty and the gift.

There is something clarifying about beginning somewhere new. The absence of precedent makes every choice deliberate. I cannot rely on what worked before, because before doesn’t exist here. What I have instead is the discomfort of the present tense — and the question of what my practice looks like when stripped of its familiar scaffolding.

I am still learning what I came here to find out.

There is something to do with arrival itself as a condition of work: not settling, not yet, but staying in that threshold state long enough to see what it produces. The first residency is always also the first draft — provisional, unresolved, honest in ways that later versions sometimes aren’t. The unfamiliarity of Puglia, its light, its particular weight of heat and history, doesn’t yet belong to me. But I am beginning to let it work on me.

St. Padre Pio -

Melpignano, 2026

In Melpignano I encountered the phenomenon of stigmata — specifically through the figure of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a man born in this region of southern Italy, who bore the wounds of Christ on his body for fifty years.

What draws me is the miracle itself, and the ecstatic states that accompanied it. Padre Pio did not simply receive wounds. He received them inside experiences of overwhelming intensity — visions, raptures, states in which the ordinary boundaries of the self appeared to dissolve entirely. The body, in these moments, was not a passive surface. It was the site where something invisible became undeniably, irreversibly physical. Where love — understood not as sentiment but as a total consuming force — pressed through the skin and bled.

This is what I keep returning to: the intimacy between ecstasy and flesh. The stigmata are inseparable from the trance states that produced them. The wound is the ecstasy made visible. And what precedes both — decades of prayer, fasting, suffering, a life given over completely to an invisible material — suggests that the body, under conditions of absolute dedication, becomes capable of things that exceed ordinary understanding. That sustained interior states can reorganise the flesh from the inside.

I am not trying to resolve this. I hold the miracle as a genuine question — one that the body understands before the mind does.

In response to this investigation I have been performing a prayer task in a local stone quarry — developing movement in solitude in the direct heat and stillness of Puglia. The material is being archived and developed into a contemporary movement film.

My practice - rooted in psychophysical training, clown, the ecstatic, the durational and film making - has always demanded a threshold state before work could start. Melpignano has proposed something different: that the threshold or frame itself creates the conditions, and that the body responds to the frame rather than the other way around. Melpignano has sent me material I couldn’t have planned for - a child’s story about a saint’s wounded hands that looked like lasagna, a fox under an oak tree, falling asleep in a church pew mid-prayer. I didn’t manufacture any of it.

Melpignano is drawing me down a path which is unveiling to me that the most alive material arrives before you know what to do with it, and that the only thing required during the encounter is to be in motion when it does. I arrived in Melpignano without a grammar for the place - no previous visit, no shortcut, no already negotiated relationship with its light or its heat or the particular weight of Salento history pressing up through the stones. The only way forward is to continue to allow this landscape to pass be me by and, to collide with what it has to say to me each day.