Salvo Lombardo is a choreographer and multimedia artist, curator and independent researcher. Artistic director of Chiasma (Rome). His research moves between dance, theater and visual arts and is positioned in-between theories and practices. In 2017-18 he was an associate artist at the Oriente Occidente Festival (Rovereto). In 2019-21 he was co-curator of Resurface Festival (Rome) focused on decolonial and postcolonial practices. In 2020 he was one of the founding members of Ostudio (Rome). Since 2021 he has been associate artist at Lavanderia a Vapore (Collegno) and curator of Interazioni Festival (Rome). In 2021 he realized the digital-community art project Punctum for the European network BeSpectActive! He is currently associated artist at the MilanOltre Festival and also one of the researchers involved in the European project Micro Macro Dramaturgies in Dance.
Salvo Lombardo
WHITE GARDEN
In his recent work Salvo Lombardo is currently reflecting on concepts such as identity, diversity, modernity, canon, stereotype and conflict, while investigating the “re-emergences” of the past colonial imaginaries on the current surface of today’s representations of the bodies. In the frame of May Town project, Lombardo’s purpose is the creation of a video work able to focus on the possible drifts of the relationship between the ethnocentric imaginary of western colonialism and the exotic and standardized iconographies that contemporary life mirrors through its media and images.
How did the West construct, also thanks to Universal and Industrial Exhibitions, its disembodied and ethnocentric gaze? Did it do so starting from which imaginary? How has the exoticization of “the Other”, in the “West culture”, found new and updated forms, in the present time? What are the links – today – between ecological rhetoric, representation of nature, cultural appropriation and exoticism?
The core of the whole idea is to mash up found footage and cut-up video clips together with a series of short video sequences created with the performer Jaskaran Anand with whom Salvo Lombardo has been collaborating for some years on these topics. The focus of the work is based on the connections between design and mass media, art and advertising, official culture and counterculture, cultural appropriation, cultural decolonization and self-representation processes.
