About the Research Community – Co.R
The Research Community (Co.R) is a space for ongoing interdisciplinary reflection and research. Here, the aesthetic, poetic and political questions raised by Altofest are collecterd and explored collectively.
Within the framework of the Co.R, authors, researchers and artists bearers of multiple perspectives and competences are invited to share their thinking practices and to animate spaces for open discussion. The Co.R’s activities explore potential connections between artistic creation and theoretical knowledge, creating opportunities for collaboration and dialogue between artists and researchers.
The practices of the Co.R engage withthe communicative and linguistic breach that emerges when the languages of theory meet the questions posed by the diverse community of citizens and artists gathered by Altofest. At Altofest, thinking is always embodied, open to encounter and contamination, and rooted in the life of the community.
The paths and activities of the Co.R settle in different formats, producing multiple literary, discursive and visual traces. In this way, a shared, choral discourse evolves together with Altofest year after year.The complete collection of these materials, together with those produced by the Critical Panel (OcR) from 2012 to 2018, is preserved in the Co.R multimedia archive, which you can explore here.
ACTIVITIES
The Journal
Conceived by Silvia Mei and curated by the Research Community, the Journal outlines an aesthetic-theoretical guide for the Fest’s Community.
It accompanies the Altofest experience by opening up multiple paths for reading and reflection.
We imagine it as a kind of hypertext that unfolds the common discursive space of our community, highlighting possible intersections between our artistic trajectories.
All the publications are available on the website >>> Co.R.
Voice Over
A daily focus on the artists and their performances — engaging Co.R members, cultural professionals, and citizens in conversation about the rewriting of domestic space and the central theme: “Harmless?”.
Voice Over is also broadcasted on Radio Leib.
The conversations are open and broadcast on Radio Leib.
Agorà
An open assembly with the Altofest community. Artists and citizens come together to share their experiences and to discuss the poetic and political mechanisms at the core of Altofest.
The Agora is an open meeting and will be broadcast on Radio Leib.
Finire per non finire
Finire per Non Finire: a new step in collective reflection
Now in its fifteenth year, Altofest continues to question its evolution within a city characterised by disruptive and frequently discordant currents of transformation.
Adopting the perspective of the end, we consider what our community can leave behind, hand over and offer to future generations.
Following Congiunzione 2024 — a hybrid residency in which choreographer Eirini Alexiou and economist Marcella De Martino explored Altofest’s transformative hospitality practices and imagined generative models of hospitality for an increasingly extractive tourist city — we now attempt to take a fresh look at the annual Altofest ritual alongside the community of citizens, artists and researchers who bring it to life. Our aim is to uncover its transformative potential within the city.
Can the exceptional nature of this collective act inform a poetically compromised and regenerated way of inhabiting everyday life?
What is the relationship between an ending (it: la fine) and a purpose (it: il fine)? Between exhaustion and fulfilment?
As a community, we ask ourselves what collective responsibility might entail. Can we envision ourselves as the authors of a creative act, shaping the path ahead?
To nourish this collective reflection, several long-standing members of the Community of Research (Co.R)—Claudia Fabris, Federica Terracina, Maurizio Alampi, Dario Gentili and Loretta Mesiti—are developing and sharing a speculative framework in which artistic practice, critical thinking, and collective imagination are intertwined.
Congiunzione
In grammar, a conjunction is an invariable part of speech used to connect two or more elements within a proposition; in astronomy, a conjunction indicates the position of two stars having the same longitude with respect to another star at a given time; in mathematics, in set theory, it is also called as conjunction an intersection or a logical product. In Altofest, this noun inaugurates a new practice, addressed to those artists who over the years have taken part in its programmes. They are invited to ‘reunite’ in a collective creation residency and to build a dialogue with a scholar, a critic, a theoretician, in order to investigate a structural, poetic or political question, which is characteristic of the Altofest device.
In the context of the Altofest Community, the aim is to inaugurate a germinal dialogue, to open up an unprecedented space, a new threshold of interaction, a liminal territory. Here, the creative perspective is reversed, since the artistic production becomes a function of critical production.
The current edition brings together Claudia Fabris and Maurizio Alampi in a ‘joint’ research project: The Economies of Altofest. Claudia Fabris’s practices of poetic re-signification and comparative etymology intersects the numerous traditions of “undisciplined” economics explored by Maurizio Alampi, in order to reframe and challenge the very ground of our notions of gift, trade, exchange, community, sharing, generation.
Members 2025
Maurizio Alampi
He began his career at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria, where he graduated and subsequently taught Public Economic Law, a subject on the border line of two “strong” disciplines such as Economics and Law.
Attracted by contamination as a principle of fertilization of every course of study (and beyond), he participates in various researches on development differentials and on the analysis of the causes of territorial differences, with particular reference to the South of Italy.
In the bank, he experienced the concentration process of the banking system from the inside, dealing at various levels of responsibility, with the analysis of local economies and the possibilities associated with new tools of negotiated planning.
Subsequently, he also follows the evolution of “economic legislation” by collaborating with various research, and training institutes.
In recent years, not too casually, he encounters the world of art on his path and discovers further and unexpected possibilities for personal growth.
Rosa Coppola
Is a Germanist, translator, and curator. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University “L’Orientale” in Naples, Italy. Intertwining archival research with a strong textual approach,
she carried out a project on Max Bense’s cybernetic poetry (2022-2024) at LMU Munich, hosted by Prof. Stephan Kammer, with the support of a Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation Postdoc Fellowship. Her
dissertation, Kathrin Rögglas Szeno-Graphien der Gegenwart, was published by De Gruyter in 2024. Coppola’s research focuses on the performativity of writing processes in prose and poetry, with particular emphasis on artificiality. She is currently editing the first Italian translation of Hubert Fichte’s novel Forschungsbericht (1981) for IISF Press. Since 2017, she has curated radio and translation projects for the
Goethe-Institut in Naples. In 2020, she won Radio Ö1 Wien’s radio-art competition with an adaptation of Ernst Jandl’s Aus der Fremde (1981). In 2025, the European Commission awarded her project on Textual automatisms the Seal of Excellence in the framework of the Marie Curie Actions.
Claudia Fabris
Claudia Fabris was born in Padua in 1973. She approached art at the age of 16 with photography, which she would never abandon. Her eyes will always be the first to know, her mind slow to spy on them. Then came dance, theatre with Tam Teatromusica (UBU special prize 2014) for years, and the creation of clothes. In 2011 she began a personal performance journey on the word with La Cameriera di Poesia, an itinerant live headphone poetry restoration, which she took everywhere in Italy; since then she has been kindly nomadic. In 2024, she published La Cameriera di Poesia with AnimaMundi, a volume born from the project.
In 2013 she began writing Parole Sotto Sale, a small poetic vocabulary, published in 2020 by the publishing house AnimaMundi in Otranto and appearing in cities as “Our Lady of Baloons”, giving her words to those who speak to her.
She has increasingly woven her artistic journey into Altofest in Naples since its first edition, as well as into La Luna e i Calanchi, the festival of Aliano (MT), and Verso Sud in Corato (Bari). For the latter, she was part of the artistic direction from 2022 to 2024 (FUS Ministerial Grant).
She loves the South and its light. She is convinced that Beauty and the silent amazement it generates can still lead every human being back to the intimate and sacred space of his soul where every transformation and rebirth takes origin, strength and nourishment. She believes that the most powerful technology on planet earth is language, the body as a place of revelation, and that Art should not be an event, but an integral part of everyday life. For this she works.
Dario Gentili
Dario Gentili teaches Moral Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre. He obtained his PhD in Ethics and Political-Judicial Philosophy at the University of Salerno; in 2009-2010 he held a post-doctoral fellowship in Philosophy and History of Ideas at Sum (Italian Institute of Human Sciences); in 2011-2012 he held a DAAD post-doctoral fellowship at the Walter Benjamin Archiv in Berlin; in 2013-2014 he was a research fellow at Sum/Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; in 2014 he was a visiting researcher at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität-Düsseldorf. He works on contemporary Italian thought, analysis of spatial dispositifs in Western political, legal and architectural thought, and conceptions of crisis in the political and economic spheres. He is the author of essays and articles published in several languages. He has written the following monographies : Il tempo della storia. Le tesi “sul concetto di storia” di Walter Benjamin (2002; 2019); Topografie politiche. Spazio urbano, cittadinanza, confini in Walter Benjamin e Jacques Derrida (2009); Italian Theory. Dall’operaismo alla biopolitica (2012); Crisi come arte di governo, Quodlibet, Macerata 2018, II ed. 2022 (translated into German and English).
Lucrezia Longobardi
Is an art critic and curator. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples with a thesis on the philosophical perspectives of dwelling and later earned a Master’s degree in Art History and Criticism from the University of Salerno, with a thesis on the concept of Performative Curating. She was awarded a research fellowship at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies and is currently a PhD candidate in Methods and Methodologies of Archaeological and Art Historical Research at the University of Salerno. Her work over the years has focused on two main critical directions: the construction of a theoretical framework that merges the concepts of curating and performance, and the mapping of the contemporary art landscape of the past twenty years. These two strands define the core of her experimental research. She contributes to industry journals such as Il Sole 24 Ore and Opera Viva, and has collaborated with non-profit spaces, private foundations, and museums including Asilo Filangieri, Museo Madre, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, Italian Cultural Institutes abroad, The Drawing Hall, Museo di Lissone, and Officine San Carlo. She has served as curator at the Morra Foundation. She has published in numerous catalogues, monographs, and books, and is the author of Lo spazio esistenziale. Definizioni e Corollari vol. 1 (iemme edizioni) and 15 Hypotheses for a History of Contemporary Art (Castelvecchi).
Daniel Melfi
Is a Canadian journalist, researcher and publisher, based in Berlin and Bologna. In January 2020, Melfi founded 20 Seconds Magazine, a biannual print-only publication for experimental music and art. He is also a co-founder of Famous Grapes Recordings and a Ph.D. candidate at the Università di Firenze, researching the history of Italian emigration in cinema. As a researcher in the archival field, Melfi has worked with the National Archive of Family Film in Bologna and Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, in Berlin. He has an MA degree in Film Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University.
Loretta Mesiti
is a dramaturg, writer, and curator of collaborative writing processes based in Brussels. Her research engages with collaborative and ecosystemic working structures, exploring artistic processes capable of freeing language from egocentric patterns and reclaiming it as a tool for imaginative engagement with reality. She is the co-founder, together with Meike Gleim, of Science of Singularities—a laboratory for artistic research and democratic imagination practices. SoS creates hybrid spaces for transformative processes involving transversal communities of artists, researchers, and citizens. In 2024, the laboratory launched Alterlibrary.com, a l digital library of regenerative sources of imagination.
Loretta is a member of the ArtScience Research Group at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and one of the initiators of the Imaginary Institut — a hyperstitional institution that explores collective intelligence and transdisciplinary processes of knowledge production rooted in complexity.
Her long-standing collaboration with TeatrInGestAzione began in 2007, and has given rise to numerous performances and complex artistic projects, such as Altofest.
Among her dramaturgy works, the performance Blickakte, directed by Daniel Schauf, won the “Was heißt hier fremd” award in Vienna in 2012. Her poetry collection Geologhemi received a special mention at the Lorenzo Montano Prize in 2017.
Matteo Spanò
Is a researcher and radio producer. His work focuses on experimental radio practice, visual and sound poetry, and the intersection between media culture and radical politics. He holds a B.A. in Electroacoustic Composition from the Paganini Conservatory, Genoa and an M.A. in Sound Studies from the UdK, in Berlin. He is co-founder of Cashmere Radio. Together with the Electroacoustic Orchestra Galata, he participated in the 58th Biennale Musica in Venice. His radio productions have been broadcast on Cashmere Radio, Deutschlandradio Kultur, Radiophrenia, Resonance.FM and WFMU. He is currently a PhD student at the UdK – Sound Studies with a research project on Radio Alice and free radio culture.
Federica Terracina – incredible fox
Is an independent artist, specialized in textile art; painter, costume designer, and trainer. “L’astrazione fenomenica” influences all of her pictorial research, she studies with the artist Michele Cossyro.The interaction in the space is the key to her research. Her work has been presented on different occasions such as Galleria291Est, Rome; Matera Basilicata 2019 European, Capiital of Culture; Lunetta Without frontiers, Mantua; Valletta 2018 European Capital of Culture; Altofest International Contemporary Live Arts, Naples; Musèe en Herbe, rue Rivoli, Paris; “Factory Pd’A” Contemporary Museum Testaccio, Rome.
From 2015 to 2019 she is the author of the graphic interventions of the “Fest Journal”, the aesthetic guide of Altofest, drawn up by the OCR (Critical Observatory) and she contributed to the volume Displace Altofest Valletta 2018, edited by Silvia Mei and Loretta Mesiti.
From 2022 she realizes the conductive Playground, e-textile fabric in Fondazione Lisio, for the multidisciplinary project: Abito Sonoro, created with G: Villani and F. Zedde.
Jol Thoms
Is an artist, researcher and educator based in London, UK. His work crosses and reconfigures boundaries between the non/human, cosmological and the scientific using strategies from quantum field theory, experimental audio-visual arts, environmental humanities, and feminist anti-colonial science studies.
Thoms is the initiator of the Radio Amnion sound art ritual, a project commissioning and transmitting artists’ messages of care deep into the Pacific Ocean during each full moon through a submerged neutrino telescope – ongoing since June 2021. He has presented this and other audio-visual works internationally, most recently in the opening of the 60th Venice Biennale; Haus Der Kunst, DE; 23rd Triennale Milano; Postscript of Silence Shanghai; Coventry Biennial, and: The Measure of the World RADIUS Centre for Cont. Art & Ecology.