The collective
About
BANDITE is an artivism collective founded in 2023 by Valentina Bosio and Simona Sala, active across performing arts, research and participatory practices. Their work grows out of an anthropological approach to physical theatre and moves through theatre, dance, visual arts, video and multimedia languages, with the aim of generating hybrid artistic devices capable of activating relational and collective experiences. BANDITE works on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, presence and erasure, activating processes tied to memory, active witnessing and unveiling. The performative and site-specific devices they develop aim to involve the audience in immersive experiences based on listening and relationship, in which participation becomes a form of knowledge and activation.
Alongside its artistic production, BANDITE carries out training and cultural mediation activities with schools and with cultural and academic institutions, through transdisciplinary workshops and laboratories on memory, borders and imaginaries. The collective’s work is presented in a range of international academic and cultural contexts dedicated to border studies, migration and contemporary artistic practices, contributing to the debate on the arts as tools for research, political activation and the construction of collective memory.
Simona Sala is a visual artist, actress and performer.
In 2006 she founded the performing arts company Sineglossa. Since 2011 she has worked at the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw (PL) within the company Teatr Zar, in the performances Armine, Sister and Medea / On Getting Across, taking part in numerous festivals including the San Francisco International Arts Festival and the Théâtre de la Tempête in Paris. In 2011 she collaborated with Fundacja Jubilo on the three-year project Unlocking in Wroclaw Penitentiary No.1 with long-sentence inmates. Between 2015 and 2018 she organised field travels to Salvador de Bahia to research Candomblé rituals and to southern Iran (Abadan) for possession rituals. In those years she collaborated with Jarosław Fret, director of Teatr Zar, on the creation of Witness Action, a new interactive and participatory approach to performance aimed at moving beyond the merely aesthetic experience towards one linked to personal identity and dignity. Between 2015 and 2017 she organised conferences and public actions in which audiences and artists discussed how art and artists can witness and act, through a new rituality of participation. In 2019 she began her latest work Alètheia, creating site-specific installations around the theme of what cannot be hidden and the relationship with memory and witness. In 2022 she made a field trip to Chiapas, Mexico, with Giovanna Maroccolo’s Fusion Art Center, following a political and social engagement within Zapatista communities.
Since 2023 she has been collaborating with the association On Borders, an ethnographic research laboratory on border crossings, on a field project between Italy and France.
Valentina Bosio is a performer, artivist and community activator. Her authorial research focuses particularly on themes such as body-scape, borders, archive and memory, moving freely between the re-mediation and proposition of a language that intersects the codes of theatre, dance and new media.
Her multidisciplinary background began with a two-year intensive program in physical theatre and performing arts at Philip Radice’s Atelier Teatro Fisico in Turin. In 2019/20 she took part in Daniele Ninarello’s permanent research and composition laboratory Il Corpo Intuitivo. In 2020 she obtained an Executive Master’s degree, with a final project on the valorisation of the landscape and cultural heritage of Alpine cross-border territories through Social and Community Theatre Methodology—a project that led her to explore the mountain territories between France and Italy for two years. She graduated from the University of Turin in DAMS (Disciplines of Art, Music and Performance) with a research thesis on dance and educational innovation, examining the decolonial practice of artist and choreographer Salvo Lombardo (2023). Significant were her encounters and collaborations with artists such as Virgilio Sieni, Daniele Ninarello, Silvia Gribaudi, Sara Leghissa, Giulia Rae and Davide Enia. Between 2018 and 2020 she was part of the young theatre formation Nouvelle Plague, resident company at the Torino Fringe Festival 2019 with La Semimbecille e altre storie, a work on female hysteria and its interpretation within 19th-century psychology, set against the stigma surrounding people labelled as psychiatrically ill today. In 2021 she founded the trans-media collective Volpi Metropolitane, experimenting with video and digital language, the notion of tiers paysage by Clément, and the body as landscape in the project erbacce perenni. In 2023 she first joined the international projects of Ponte tra Culture soc.coop. Italia, beginning to collaborate with Gianluca Barbadori and Simona Sala.
She currently works on the Alpine border between Italy and France with the actress and visual artist Simona Sala, with whom she founded the collective BANDITE in 2023. BANDITE aims to transcend purely performative language, developing a fusion of diverse codes and forms of expression that reclaim theatre as a collective space and a privileged observatory for engaging with and comprehending the contemporary. Their latest projects explore memory, witnessing and cross-border migratory movements, culminating in site-specific works on the territory between Italy and France. Their work involves numerous collaborations, especially with the community and local realities, and partnerships with entities including Ponte tra Culture soc.coop. Italia, the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, Université Grenoble Alpes and the Pacte social science laboratory in Grenoble.
Collaborations
