Italian Rituals is a long-term, practice-based research project situated at the intersection of performance studies, art history, and ritual theory. The work is grounded in decades of engagement with Italian language, visual culture, and urban life, alongside formal academic study of Italian Renaissance art history, with particular focus on chapel decoration from approximately 1380–1520, from Giotto through the High Renaissance. This period—marked by the emergence of sequential narrative, perspectival space, choreographed bodies, and affective spectatorship—provides a foundational framework for the project.

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Narrative fresco cycles of the late medieval and Renaissance periods functioned as immersive, time-based environments designed to be experienced through bodily movement. Viewers progressed physically through chapel space as meaning unfolded across adjacent scenes, activating empathy, memory, and spiritual identification. Read through a contemporary lens, these painted cycles may be understood as proto-cinematic: among the earliest “moving pictures,” in which narrative emerges through duration, spatial progression, and embodied viewing rather than through a single fixed image. These visual strategies anticipated principles later formalized in cinema, including montage, choreographed gesture, and temporal sequencing.

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Recent site-responsive performances along the Appia Antica and on Tiburtina Island extend this lineage into contemporary practice. The Appia Antica, historically a funerary and processional road lined with tombs and memorial structures, functions as a corridor between the living and the dead. Tiburtina Island—long associated with healing cults, liminality, and crossing—has served since antiquity as a threshold space, home to temples of Asclepius and later sites of care, refuge, and passage. Together, these locations operate as charged ritual environments where walking, pausing, and orientation become both method and medium. Drawing on principles of sequential narration and embodied spectatorship inherited from Renaissance visual culture, the work activates these sites as living archives of memory. Conceived as an evolving inquiry aligned with my Fulbright and Rome Prize proposals, Italian Rituals positions ritual performance as a form of embodied historiography and cultural listening, reanimating cultural heritage through the lived presence of the moving body.

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Italian Rituals è un progetto di ricerca performativa a lungo termine che si colloca all’incrocio tra studi sulla performance, storia dell’arte e teoria del rituale. Radicato in decenni di relazione con la lingua, la cultura visiva e il paesaggio urbano italiani, il lavoro si fonda su una formazione accademica nella storia dell’arte del Rinascimento, con particolare attenzione ai cicli decorativi delle cappelle tra il 1380 e il 1520, da Giotto all’Alto Rinascimento. Attraverso performance site-specific lungo l’Appia Antica e sull’Isola Tiberina—luoghi storicamente legati al passaggio, alla memoria funeraria e alle pratiche di cura—il progetto indaga il movimento come strumento di conoscenza e ascolto culturale, attivando il paesaggio storico come archivio vivente e ripensando la performance rituale come forma di storiografia incarnata.

Parallel to this research is an extensive history of experimental street theatre in Italian cities, including Rome, Venice, and Florence. This public-facing practice has informed the project’s emphasis on immediacy, improvisation, and reciprocal presence, dissolving conventional boundaries between performer, site, and audience. Street performance operates here as a contemporary analogue to historical ritual forms—ephemeral, accessible, and embedded within everyday life.