Threads of Touch Residency
About
When we, as artists, take a residency in a peripheral town with the intent to engage with a local community, we often don't feel the need to rush into the studio. We place ourselves instead outside — in the fresh air, the most crowded alley, the locals' favourite cafe, in rhythms that feel unfamiliar — and the environment begins to enter. The relational field of the community, its quality of attention, the particular way people occupy their own public space, begins to act on us in ways that are difficult to account for and impossible to manufacture.
This side of TЯA holds more than 20 artists' voices and testimonies from a residency in Melpignano, in the south of Italy, where they worked in deliberate proximity with a local community — without resolving that encounter into a single account.
Gathering these voices is not merely documentary — it is a repositioning: when artists enter a peripheral place, their very presence performs a narrative, and that narrative, left unattended, is rarely theirs, and rarely the community's. Staying close to practice itself — to what artists do and notice and carry, to the strategies and the moments that are usually left unnamed — is how that changes; it is the discipline of voicing experience from the inside, with curiosity and self-criticism, rather than leaving it to be spoken by other agendas. And holding that account open, on the other side of this site, for the community to answer from theirs, is how it becomes complete.The project takes its name from the Italian preposition — tra, among, between — written with a flipped R that folds the word Art inside it. The encounter changes us, the artists, and the place, Melpignano.
Lead by: Giacomo Veronesi
Practices
The residency community circle and proposes accounts of ways of training in relation, even when with oneself: testimonies from practitioners gathered around shared somatic research, where making, learning, documenting, and disseminating are not separate stages but continuous movements within the same process.Everything created in these residencies is, first and foremost, relational — an account of conversations, shared moments of practice, and the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and care, both in the work itself and in what holds the work up.What this page gathers — documents, reflections, records of what happens in the room and around it — is an attempt to make that visible: to bring to the surface the quality of attention, the small decisions, the care that runs through how practitioners are with each other before the work takes form; to give a place to what would otherwise remain minor or unnamed.These accounts do that work in two directions: outward, as transparency toward anyone seeking to understand or engage with these ecologies; and inward, as a living record of a collective practice that frames the gathering as a first step into working with communities, and knows its process is inseparable from what it produces.
Resistenze e Metabolizzazioni is a four-week artistic residency in Melpignano, a small town in the Salento region of southern Italy, bringing together twenty-three performance makers, researchers, and local collaborators from across Europe. It is the fourth iteration of a practice that began in 2021, and the first to operate within a fully articulated research framework.
The residency is structured around the practice of tasking — short, declared explorations sent into the village each morning, held by a peer, documented, and brought back at the end of the day for collective reflection. Tasks are not the work; they are the conditions under which something can happen. What they are designed to produce is encounter: with the place, with its people, with the limits of one's own artistic habits.
The conceptual frame for this iteration is drawn from two terms held in deliberate tension: resistenze — what refuses to be assimilated, in a culture, in a body, in a practice — and metabolizzazioni — the slow conversion of experience into capacity to act. Neither is privileged over the other. The work lives at the crossroads between them.
Angel Encounter Task
Perfromer: Maria Papachristodoulou
Cinematographer & Editor: Edward Skaines
