HARMLESS?
Harmless is an English adjective that refers to something “innocuous, inoffensive”, lacking the ability or intention to cause harm.
Harmless is not offensive, does not impose, and is unarmed. It may be seen as irrelevant or as incapable of producing significant change.
By extension, harmless appears gentle in its manner, capable of adapting to any context without forcing it, putting those who meet it at ease.
To us, being harmless is not just a state or a quality but a perspective from which to question our way of being together as a body, knowing, and acting.
From this perspective, multiple thought paths unfold the trajectories of thoughts that we invite you to pursue as you go through the Altofest program this year. The performances that compose it show us a stripped body, unharmed, not oriented to conquer. Harmless. A body that does not master, but embraces. A body that does not forge, but allows itself to be shaped in the encounter.
The body, in its full exposure and vulnerability, becomes a vessel for a new way of perceiving. It does not attempt to assert itself through a virtuous gesture, but practices accuracy and subtraction to make itself an echo, a space of resonance, a vacuum ready for listening.
These performances open gates – glimpses, to imagine a possible form of knowledge based on embodied experience, relationship, and sensitive listening. Following their visions, we imagine abandoning the Promethean tension of a subject accustomed to organising the world according to functional categories for control: forcing it into an orderly, hierarchical system designed to distinguish what is relevant and what can be left out. Let us try to dismantle knowledge as a practice of conquest that has in power its centre of gravity, from which the geometries of a macho, anthropocentric and colonial logic have been defined.
Instead, we explore the hypothesis of relational science, founded on a subtle perception. This knowledge has left behind any claim of producing universal and totalising statements to be enclosed in the Archives of History, to dwell on the situated, partial, transient datum. Thus, a possible epistemology of the limit is looming, capable of detecting local, marginal, overlooked phenomena and producing itself in permeable mappings, in atlases made of minute traces, in “physiographies” of the living, moving on the threshold of the imperceptible.
The practices embodied in these works move in this intermediate zone, lying between the gesture and its evanescence.
Disarmed knowledge begins here: by noting what a body cannot do and showing that limit that a body should not cross.
Harmless then is not just a state or a quality, but a stance: a form of knowing, an attitude, toward which to steer one’s way of being body and acting by reshaping the geometries of the gesture, the parameters of value, the metrics of acting.
But how can we translate this stance in the polis, in history, in the conflicts that go through us? How does a bare, not belligerent body act in our world?
From these questions, we try to consider the disarming vulnerability that a body reveals to us when faced with deployed weapons and the disarming and subversive strength that the same body can express when it becomes collective, when these vulnerabilities meet and manifest as a whole.
To what extent is the body of citizens Harmless, as they stand by helplessly while weapons are deployed and find themselves politically irrelevant?
In what sense can we also consider the body of every artist Harmless when called upon to question the relevance or irrelevance of their gesture, at a time when they, like all of us, inhabit a condition of radical powerlessness in the face of the world’s persistent empathetic ineptitude?
Can we embrace and reclaim this condition?
Can a disarmed body become an instrument of resistance, bear witness to a legacy, let absence resonate—when faced with mechanisms of power designed to erase the traces left by lives, not merely by extinguishing biological existence, but by dissolving its very possibility of persistence, of memory, of return?
What can a harmless body do in the face of an ongoing genocide?
To what extent are we, then, harmless—unfit to win, to prevail?
And might we, in that very measure, choose to become harmless—to begin, once again, to listen?
Altofest’s dramaturgy arises from contemplating the numerous proposals we receive through an international open call. It aims to grasp the thread running through the works in the programme. By following the lines connecting the aesthetics and themes proposed by the artists, we try to make room for the questions that challenge us and our present time.
The editorial reflects the path of this process. It has an open and polysemic character, in which one can sense the echo of the artists’ words.
It is conceived as the first line of a discourse with many voices that will be written together in the coming days.
We invite artists, researchers, citizens, and all members of the People of Altofest to inhabit this space of questioning, allowing it to be nourished by the presence, lived experience, and vision of the performances to continue unfolding and enriching the tapestry of reflection.