La Magia e la Storia dei Luoghi Siamo Noi
Photo Project live at Spazio Matta — photography, theatre, music and dance
La Magia e la Storia dei Luoghi Siamo Noi was a live encounter between photography, theatre, music and dance: not simply a projection of images, but a collective performance in which every photograph became a story, every text became voice, every sound opened an emotional space, and every gesture transformed vision into stage presence.
The event took place on Saturday 25 January 2025 inside the performance space of SPAZIO MATTA in Pescara, curated and organised by Fotografia Pino Giannini. The project brought together a group of photographers and authors around a series of short visual narratives: individual photographic thoughts, yet conceived as part of a shared team effort.
Each story took shape from the images projected onto the big screen. The voice of Alessandra Arcieri introduced and interpreted the texts, defining the emotional tone of each narrative just moments before the soundscapes by Luca Cipressi — Yours Truly — began to surround the hall with rhythms, expressive textures and musical comments designed to pay homage to the visual identity of each work. On stage, the blindfolded dancer Bruna Cerasa physically embodied what words and photographs left vibrating in the air: harmonic movements, sudden twitches, suspended postures, tremors and torsions capable of turning narration into body.
A photo project built like a stage score
The strength of the project lay in its hybrid nature. The photographs were not treated as simple images to be observed in sequence, but as narrative nuclei. Each author brought a personal gaze on places, memory and lived intimacy; the video montage arranged those fragments into a scenic progression; the voice gave the images a theatrical breath; the sound opened an additional emotional landscape; the dance made the inner tension of each story visible.
This layering transformed Spazio Matta into a place of shared listening. The audience was not merely attending a photographic exhibition, nor only a theatrical or musical performance: it was guided into a sensitive device in which photography, words, body and sound responded to one another.
Pino Giannini: photography as relationship and storytelling
The project grew out of the experience of Pino Giannini, a professional photographer based in Chieti. After training in Rome, including at the Istituto Europeo di Design, Giannini has run his own photography studio since 2002, working on events, portraiture, reportage, advertising, corporate and industrial photography. Over time, his path has also expanded into teaching, with photography courses at various levels launched in 2016, where technique becomes above all an education of the gaze.
One particularly meaningful aspect of his work is his relationship with live music: Pino Giannini is the photographer for the concert season of the Teatro Marrucino in Chieti and for the international classical music festival Chieti Classica. This familiarity with the stage, with the timing of performance and with its unrepeatable intensity can also be felt in Photo Project: photography is never merely documentation, but an act of presence, shared memory and listening to the other.
Alessandra Arcieri: the word that opens the images
The presence of Alessandra Arcieri gave the evening a precise narrative direction. A director, screenwriter and author from Abruzzo, Arcieri has worked across television, cinema, theatre, documentary, music video and writing. Her career includes experience with thematic television channels, collaborations with audiovisual productions, teaching activities in screenwriting and creative writing, as well as the dystopian novel Proiezione Origami, a finalist at the BUK Modena literary prize in 2017.
In the context of this performance, her voice was not simply introductory. It was a threshold. It entered before sound and body, oriented the act of listening, and prepared each image to become story. Her interpretation of the texts proposed by the authors allowed every photographic sequence to open in a different way: sometimes with delicacy, sometimes with suspension, sometimes with a more theatrical and cinematic tension.
Bruna Cerasa: the body as poetic translation
Bruna Cerasa brought an essential physical dimension to the performance. A dancer, performer, author and poet, she trained at the professional training centre Progetto Danza in Chieti, directed by Tiziano Di Muzio, and joined the TDM Dance Group in 2018. Her path brings together contemporary dance, theatre, writing and performative research, with experience in stage and multidisciplinary projects such as Augmented Me, works by the TDM Dance Group and collaborations in which body, word and music intertwine.
The choice to dance blindfolded made the relationship between vision and the invisible even stronger. As the images flowed across the screen, Bruna’s body seemed to intercept their unsaid part: their emotional weight, emptiness, memory and urgency. Her dance did not illustrate the photographs descriptively; it moved through them, transforming their content into gesture, balance, fall, tremor and listening.
Sound, images and live presence
For this performance I built a sonic commentary conceived as an environment in motion. Each photographic sequence required a different treatment: in some moments it was necessary to leave space for the voice and for the suspension of the image; in others, the narrative rhythm needed support through stronger pulses, electronic textures, rarefied harmonies or more physical elements.
The live soundscaping was therefore a form of dialogue with the other languages on stage. It did not simply accompany the photographs: it sought to amplify their breath, to give the audience an additional resonance, and to reveal what existed between one word and the next, between one image and the following one, between a movement and its arrest.
Photography, Theatre, Music, Dance… a magical blend of art, passion and friendship. Endless thanks to all the photographer-narrators, who through their stories gave us a glimpse into their own intimacy. A special thought for three dear friends who are always there: Alessandra Arcieri, Bruna Cerasa and Luca Cipressi.
The photographs, ordered and edited into a video, will be projected onto the big screen accompanied by the soundscapes of Luca Cipressi, by the voice of Alessandra Arcieri interpreting the texts proposed by the authors, and by Bruna Cerasa, who will dance freely, letting herself be carried by music, words and images.
Photographs and texts by
- Ludovico Belli
- Emanuele Cerreto
- Domenico Ciccotelli
- Manolo Creati
- Francesca D’Amato
- Anna D’Arcangelo
- Danilo Di Gianvittorio
- Giselda Di Iorio
- Alessandra D’Urbano
- Lorella Dubini
- Anna Paola Fasoli
- Chantal Gouby
- Tania Salvatore
- Agnese Sansonetti
- Marcello Tacconelli
- Paolo Tamburro
- Sandro Veglianti
Special thanks
Photogallery
Press
- SPAZIO MATTA - La magia dei luoghi & La storia siamo noi
- ilPescara.it - La magia dei luoghi & La storia siamo noi