Project promoted by The Department of Culture of Roma Capitale, Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and Fondazione Mattatoio di Roma – Città delle Arti
L’Incanto is a project by John Cascone and Veronica Cruciani comprising three works: the performance La Prefigurazione, the environmental installation Il Respiro, and the video projection L’ignoto, Sconosciuto, Altrove. The performance guides the audience toward the space of perception through a sonic and physical dramaturgy that introduces figures, presences, and motifs that reappear throughout the experience. It is followed by the environmental installation, which transforms the theatre into a traversable landscape evoking the atmosphere of woodland undergrowth. Within this environment, the video projection L’ignoto, Sconosciuto, Altrove unfolds in four chapters and emerges from a long process of research developed across different urban and natural contexts.
The project does not unfold linearly: what is first experienced through the performance and the installation re-emerges in the video in the form of recognition, displacement, and reactivation, producing a continuous shift between experience, memory, and anticipation. Enchantment is not simply an aesthetic emotion, but a perceptual and cognitive event: the moment when reality offers a glimpse of a possibility that language has not yet organized, and the world appears temporarily unstable, as if something were exceeding its usual coordinates without yet becoming knowledge. In this sense, enchantment is an intermediate phase in which that which has not yet taken shape begins to exert a hold on experience — a state of fascination, an enigmatic attraction, something that disorients and draws us in at the same time, without yet being able to be named.
Enchantment thus plays a decisive role: it makes possible the transition from the unknown to the imaginable. Without this phase, what is radically other would remain outside experience. Enchantment suspends the immediacy of what is already known, useful, functional, and algorithmically determined, creating an indeterminate time. It is precisely in our relationship with nature that this suspension of reality becomes particularly evident: in this vision, nature no longer appears as an object to be used or interpreted, but as a presence that exceeds us.
Born from four years of workshops, dialogues, and situated practices, L’Incanto brings together a shared exploration of the limits of the imaginable and the conditions of vision. Through the collaboration between John Cascone and Veronica Cruciani, the project constructs a unified framework in which sound, language, body, space, and image intertwine to shape an experience that does not simply represent the unknown, but makes it perceptible. Rather than offering a closed narrative, L’Incanto opens up a space in which perception and thought remain in motion, and in which the work continues to resonate beyond its apparent conclusion.
From Tuesday to Sunday, 4:30pm – 7:30pm (Closed on Monday)
Screening: 3 daily slot 4:30pm, 5:30pm e 6:30pm