Safffo is a collective formed in Rome in 2022 with the aim of providing a space for independent queer artistic expression. Safffo events respond to the need to create spaces where bodies that do not necessarily correspond to the cis-heteronormative conception can find a home. Safffo is a celebration of many different realities, united together by an artistic thread that looks at the creation of safer spaces based on consent, freedom of expression and absence of judgement.
At Short Theatre 2024, Safffo occupies Studio 1 from Sunday morning until night, with a multifaceted offering that moves and frees bodies.
Timetable:
❋ 11:00 am – 1:00 pm MUTATIONS by S.M.O.T.
❋ 8:30 pm Safffic Hangout
❋ 11:00 pm Violeta Garcìa (live)
❋ 12:00 am Luma (dj set)
Safffo (with three fs) is a collective formed in Rome with the aim of giving space to independent queer artistic expression. Born in June 2022, founded by Marta Massarelli and Lucy Bellotti and now involving the participation of Ilaria Piccolo. Safffo events respond to the need to create spaces where bodies that do not necessarily correspond to the cis-heteronormative conception find a home. The intention is to remove the superfluous, be it barriers, clothes, judgements, preconceptions and bigots, creating a necessary option for Rome’s LGBTQIA+ nightlife. Safffo is a celebration of many different realities, united together by an artistic thread. The artistic proposals draw attention to the importance of overturning stereotypes, clichés that survive in our time. Security policies for creating safer spaces are based on consent, freedom of expression and non-judgment. Safffo events do not exclude and are not born from opposition to something, but from the desire for sharing and union, through artistic expression, where the rules of hetero-cis normativeness are challenged and subverted to the rhythm of celebration.
Violeta García is a cellist, composer, improviser and curator from Argentina. She is a performer and composer in many art forms, including free improvisation, contemporary and hybrid electronic noise sets with the violoncello and analog synths. Violeta actively engages in experimentation with extended techniques, prepared instruments, and the exploration of dynamic, rhythmic, and original melodic combinations during her intense performances. She performed in contemporary art museums and festivals around the world since the last ten years.
S.M.O.T is an acronym (Sistemi in Movimento Ontologico Teatrale). This research begins in 2021, during the pandemic, and seeks to respond to a need: to find movement again. Physical, concrete, spiritual, emotional movement. Movement as a profound encounter with the self, with others. Movement and encounter that exist in the space of multidisciplinarity: theatre and dance are the bodily tools that convey the dialogue between theoretical studies and experiences elaborated on an individual level and through collective practices. Movement as an alternative to immobilisation as a systemic risk. Fluidity travelling between physicality and emotionality is a powerful weapon against the rigid cages of capitalism and heterocispatriarchal neo-colonialism. But where does this movement that is S.M.O.T. take us? Towards a question: how can we liberate the body from the oppressions that inhabit it and affect our being in the world? And how can we do this by acting through the body itself, by simply listening to it? S.M.O.T. is a project of liberation and has a transfeminist and queer political positioning: between excess, claim and revolt, S.M.O.T. invites us to welcome and embrace, connect and expand, destroy and create, with care. S.M.O.T. is a continuous becoming. S.M.O.T. was born in 2021, from ideas and urgings of Lucia Bellotti but, since 2023, after the suicide of a dear friend, a sister, it faces the world as a tool for processing and sharing trauma, which is also the main access key to love.
ph. Marta Massarelli
