Embracing Places

Presentation

"Embracing Places'' builds on the VR experience of "Peaceful Places”, winner of the prestigious Auggie Award for Best Art at the 2021 AWE - Augmented World Expo in California. Peaceful Places was created by Margherita Landi, an internationally recognized XR performance artist (Italy, Netherlands, UK, USA), and Agnese Lanza, a choreographer and dancer specialized in community projects (Italy, UK). It was realized in Passariano (Italy), involving local citizen couples in the process and filmed at the beautiful Villa Manin. This location remains memorable to all users due to the high emotional impact of the experience, derived from the balance between artistic and human heritage.

Following this success, "Embracing Places" aims to develop a project inspired by the previous one but personalized for each village, involving its citizens and locations.

"Embracing Places" aims to actively involve local communities and the artistic and landscape heritage of small towns. The project will target peripheral, semi-peripheral, and internal areas, whose cultural peculiarities are less evident for mass tourism or, in some cases, overshadowed by neighboring, more attractive centers.
"Embracing Places" is thus a participatory and inclusive Virtual Reality performance.

The VR artwork, resulting from a workshop with citizen couples, is characterized by a 360° artistic video shot in a location chosen from among the possible architectural beauties of the town where participants live.

The artwork, accessible through VR headsets, allows everyone to transform their emotional state into movement, training their empathy and their body to embrace.

So a performance inside the headset generates a performance outside the headset. thanks to the user’s movement: a delicate, profound dance.

Real people will be the protagonists of the video, with real emotional bonds that will guide the user's movement, sharing their tenderness. Nobody will do the same sequence of movement, everybody can join.

Artistic Team

The Giardino Chiuso Company was founded in 1998 in San Gimignano (SI), after various experiences of its founders in the fields of theater, contemporary dance and visual art, directing its research toward the contamination of languages, a distinctive feature that still characterizes the poetics of the company. Over the years the work has expanded, carrying out activities of organizing cultural events, offering support to young artists and associated artists with affinity to the company's work. The scenic language of the works has always investigated visual art through video mapping and videos produced live or in post production; since 2020 it has been promoting a project on new technologies on 3D and VR evolution. Also in 2020, the collaboration with Margherita Landi, Agnese Lanza and Massimo Bevilacqua begins, due to affinities and mutual new technology research interests. Margherita Landi (Italy) is a performer and multimedia artist with a background in Cultural Anthropology. Since 2010, Margherita has been at the forefront of incorporating cutting-edge technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) into her choreographic work. Agnese Lanza (Italy) is a community dance artist, contemporary dancer and choreographer, she brings a strong focus on community engagement and collaboration to the creative team. Her works are marked by community building and inclusiveness, through collaborative projects and community outreach initiatives. Massimo Bevilacqua (Italy) is the curator of the project, brings a wealth of experience in visual arts, virtual design, and theatrical scenography. Since 2004, he has been working with Teatro Studio Krypton, a company famous for Theater-Architecture projects. He has participated in projects for the Biennale Musica of Venice (2013) and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (2015 and 2018).