APL PREMIO VIENNA Artists 2024
We extend a warm welcome to Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and Francesco Corsi, who have been selected as Premio Vienna artists at the APL!
The residency programme for young Italian artists working in the field of performance art will be conducted as a collaboration between the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC) – Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI), the Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna (IIC), the University of Applied Arts Vienna / Applied Performance Laboratory (APL) and Bears in the Park from November 2024 to May 2025.
Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and Francesco Corsi were selected by a commission and awarded a six-month residency in Vienna, during which they will engage in professional research in the field of performance art. They will participate in activities organised by the Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna and the APL. The APL’s programme will comprise training sessions, in-depth discussions about the APL’s artistic research projects, coaching sessions, and events with artists from Vienna and around the world. Moreover, the fellows will be afforded the chance to present their theoretical research findings and practice to the public, either during or at the conclusion of their tenure in Vienna.
Meet Premio Vienna fellow: Gaia Ginevra Giorgi
Gaia Ginevra Giorgi is an artist and researcher working within the field of performing arts. Her practice integrates writing, sound, voice, and performative devices. Drawing from a feminist, ecological, and situated approach, she develops investigative methodologies aimed at an affective and political rewriting of archives and landscapes, understood as territories of manipulation and power, but also as potential tools for counter-narration. Her interventions—whether performances, installations, or workshop-based projects—create ephemeral habitats, spaces for embodied and radical imagination.
Her current research explores hauntological practices through sonic, vocal, and performative lenses, focusing on their political potential to shape and generate alternative futures. She examines the relationships between archival documents, immaterial traces, ghosts, and heritage. During her residency in Vienna, she engages with a vocal archive, investigating psychoacoustic phenomena. Through techniques of embodiment and the exploration of self-induced trance states, she is dedicated to the vocal and corporeal exploration of glossolalia and otherworldly voices.
Meet Premio Vienna fellow: Francesco Corsi
Francesco Corsi works between choreography, performance, and visual arts. His research is an exploration of the body as a social/material/semiotic compost in its meeting with the world. His work has been shown in different formats in Venere in Teatro Festival (Venice), Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), Base (Milan), WpZimmer (Antwerp), and Zürcher Theatre Spektakel (Zürich). He has collaborated in various configurations with Michele Rizzo, Daniele Ninarello, Traslochi Emotivi, and Pankaj Tiwari.
With this new research, inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s Critique of Rectitude, I will research and compose a cartography of postures, focusing on its ethical inscriptions on the flesh: from the deconstruction of a vertical body and its claim to an autonomous subjectivity—incarnated in the figure of the soldier—to the affirmation of the hor(n)izontal body, through the inclined body and who knows what else. Working on movement readymades, military drills, choreographic collages, and weird physicalities, I am looking for figures, spectres, states, and incarnations that will compose a choreographic map/archive of postural geometries.
ARTIST TALK(ING) 12.01.2024 Georg-Coch-Platz 2, APL Studio, 18:00 - 21:00
ARTISTS TALK(ING) is an evening featuring Carolina Cappelli and Marco-Augusto Basso, the winners of the first edition of Premio Vienna.
During this event, Carolina and Marco-Augusto will introduce themselves and their artistic works to a broader audience. They will also be leading an open conversation, delving into various topics that arise throughout the evening. We encourage everyone to join us in this exchange and experiment around poetic imagery and alternative narratives, talk(ing) with us over a glass of wine and some taralli!
Premio Vienna is a collaborative project between the Italian Institute of Culture of Vienna, the Italian Ministry of Culture and APL, which aims to foster the development of partnerships between Italy and Austria within the emerging performance art scene. This residency program is designed for young Italian artists in the field of performance art and is conducted in partnership with the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Angewandte Performance Laboratory (APL). This year Carolina Cappeli and Marco-Augusto Basso are the chosen residency artists. Scroll down for more information about them!
Carolina Cappeli
Carolina Cappelli is an Italian performer, filmmaker and artistic gymnastic teacher. Her research involves the hybridization between writing and performative and cinematographic practices. Strongly related to re-enactment as a primary tool of investigation, she often works with existing material as a starting point for generating alternative narratives and researching on the image of the catastrophe and the catastrophe of the image. Together with Roberto Fassone, she has a studio in a nursing home. Since 2019, Carolina is member and curator of Foglia Tonda, an association which investigate the different management of internal rural areas of the peninsula.
I would describe my research as trans-disciplinary, based on the intersection of filmmaking, workshops, live performance and writing. During the past years, my focus has been increasingly related to the hybridization of moving images and live practices, conceiving re-enactment as a recycling operation by reframing and distorting pre-existent footage. In particular, I see the re-staging of films (whether home movies, fictional, or documentaries) as an opportunity to make a parallel time and space appear, working with a set that never completely goes away. I have found myself deeply engaged by the “documentarization” of fiction and fictionalization of the documentary, having a deep interest in what Julie Perini calls relational filmmaking and in setting up situations in which it is possible to make short-circuits happen, as well as collaborating with different communities, usually of non-actresses\actors. During the past two years, I’ve been working on the repetition of catastrophes staging and the formation of survival communities, researching on the idea of post-visionaries as people with the obsolete super-power of foresee a past future, arriving so late for the ongoing disaster to be in advance for the next one. 
Marco-Augusto Basso
Marco-Augusto Basso is an Italian researcher and performer, his practice develops devices and strategic practices on poetic imagery and investigates their performative capabilities. He works between the possibilities provided by the theatrical and musical context with research-based performance projects (such as the post-exotic series presented in 2021 at Pinksummer), and electronic music. He carries out a practical activity as sculptor and curator focusing on multiplicities and binarisms in historical and antropological context. He is founder and curator of the artist-run space ‘Palazzo Bronzo’ in Genoa, Italy.
My practice tries to include a strong analysis of dystopian culture, embarking on a path that inhabits non-binarisms, trying to discredit rational negativism and inhabiting narrative hypotheses that do not necessarily agree with each other. With the cycle of performances ‘lessons on post-exoticism’ presented at Pinksummer Contemporary Art and at Teatro della Tosse in Genoa, I think I have concluded a first part of the path. I intend to continue this research winking at theory fiction and literary speculation to include it in a denser theoretical environment, inhabited by hyper-real and spectral presences. 
I wish to use the performance as a passe-partout to lead into a living image, preparing the performers to bring to the surface images and stories that are difficult to read and haunted, populated by triggers and loops that look at the biography of the gen-z and shift it into a dreamlike dimension. The methodologies in the field call for bodies, sculptures, electronic music, the visual archive and secrecy: the ultimate tool to open the queer component of the act to the abyss of possible mystery. The imaginary of reference is certainly that of a post-Harawayan ecological contact with the strategies of responsibility between nature and cuture, between body and law, attempting to treat diversity and the queer (in the words of Karen Barad) as an incatalogisable, lively changing organism.