Playing Memories is a project of experimentation and creative research, born from the meeting of twelve young talents, chosen among the best students of the most prestigious institutes of higher artistic education.

The cast, composed of 6 musicians, 4 dancers, and 2 visual artists, included students from Italy, Georgia, Sri Lanka, and Portugal. We spent 15 days in artistic residence at the Alfredo Casella Conservatory in L'Aquila, with the goal of bringing to life a performance that blended music, dance, and visual arts.

Forty minutes of show, a short time, suspended between past and present, where memory becomes the protagonist. Playing Memories is an immersive experience, a visual and emotional experiment, in which the timeless melodies of the great Italian composers resonate under the fingers of a jazz ensemble, which reinterprets them in a new, current and vibrant guise.

During the Playing Memories project, my colleague Pedro and I had the incredible opportunity to work as visual artists, creating the visuals for each of the 8 pieces in the performance. Over the course of two weeks, we designed and crafted visuals that complemented the soundtracks by renowned Italian composers. These soundtracks were reinterpreted with special arrangements by a team of 6 amazing musicians and a powerful choreography by 4 incredible dancers.

Our role was to enhance the emotional depth of the performance by creating visuals that would immerse the audience in the cinematic world of each piece. We drew inspiration from the timeless melodies and iconic scenes of Italian cinema, designing elements that could transform the stage and bring the music and dance to life. All the visuals were created manually, using analog techniques, and filmed so that they could be played in the background during the performance, adding an additional layer of visual storytelling.

The result was a visually stunning and emotionally charged performance that we presented at the Conservatorio Alfredo Casella in L'Aquila, and later at the Conservatorio in Tbilisi, Georgia. The combination of our visuals, the musicians' arrangements, and the dancers' choreography created a truly immersive experience, where memory and emotion became the central themes.

For La Ciociara (Two Women), Pedro and I wanted to show that the violence portrayed in the film is still relevant today. The movie tells the story of Cesira and her daughter Rosetta, who experience extreme violence during World War II.

To represent this, we created silhouettes of the two characters and filled them with current news clippings about violence against women. This collage connected the past and present, showing that these issues still exist. We then poured red paint over the silhouettes to represent blood, emphasising the seriousness of the violence.

This approach helped bring the film's powerful message into a contemporary context, highlighting that the struggles of women are ongoing.