Since 2019 my artistic practice has predominantly manifested in the open spaces of cities and towns in Italy and across Europe. I take great pleasure in conceptualising and presenting my performances in the appealing city centres drenched in history and  architecture, forgotten stories, surviving customs; in causing the passerby to stop and look, invest time and energy, ask questions, offer answers; in engendering a transient community brought together by art. The reflection on the many encounters with the other in the street triggered the shift of my focus from artist/artwork to audience. I began a textual research in a relatively recent field of studies: audience engagement.

Performance art is an artform sui generis, insofar as it is ephemeral, unmediated, dematerialised, informal, free and accessible to all. It does not require a designated space, a ticket, or a critic, to be experienced: it is enough to be human. Can we call audience the people whose curiosity is piqued by a performance in the street? Can we open up to other sciences to explain the sometimes magical mechanisms of engagement between the artist and the other in the street? What about those who spurn performance art?

After a short contextualisation and introduction, I will depart from a specific definition of performance art and select the two guiding key words, experience and people. I will unfold possible meanings of the former, drawing concepts also from psychological  aesthetics and positive psychology, whilst preparing the ground for the latter. I will then widen the term audience to include public, particularly with regard to performance art presented in open spaces, which therefore offers two exciting dimensions: complete accessibility and possibility of intervention. These are manifestations of liveness, one of the topics of audience research in the performing arts. Recovering the initial word experience and drawing from the most recent research in performance studies, I will move onto discuss the prospect of liveness as experience, not as a monolithically ontological quality of performance art, but as a lively and contingent dimension of the intersubjective relationship. Lastly, I will introduce the metaphor of kōan for spontaneous performance art, before moving on to apply the interesting kōan/satori cognitive schema from recent research, to put forward a possible explanation for the mechanisms of resistance to performance art or its potential overcoming.

I will conclude with a short report on my new series of performances Talking statues that I plan to present in Rome this summer. Those interested, please contact me through my website.