Graduated in Visual Arts and Environmental Engineering, Alessio Mazzaro (1985, Italy) is artist and performer interested in participatory art practiced as a way to create frameworks for less hierarchical forms of knowledge production, listening as a trigger for stories, and what we can achieve through linguistic interaction.
 
His practice brings forth unconventional forms of hospitality while dealing with the consequences of the narratives we were taught in the Western world, the “performativité du partage” and the poetics of fragments.
Setting up environments, publications and collective performances, he uses recorded voice, montage, collective conversation and scenic elements, to generate complex collected oral narratives where different lived experiences can coexist.
 
With a look at anarchist pedagogy and the crisis of the European sciences, he challenges normative power, neoliberal education and the positivist and theoretical attitude, advocating for presence and practice, horizontality and complexity. Criticizing a society in which narratives and debates are highly polarized, but also simplified, he activates with his artworks processes where meaning is something collectively negotiated between different speakers and not detained by a single one.
 
His research leads him to displace himself into long-term collaborations with communities and places as a foreigner, working every time in the local language and learning it as a form of respect. This generates an archipelago of actions, documents and artworks that activate politically the spectator, asking the public to take a position toward a subject, to reconsider an event or to open a space for imagination.
 
If part of his role is to choreograph experiences and creates symbolic and safe spaces of encounter to trigger collective conversations, on the other side, it is also to edit the audio recordings of what is said, using fiction and autofiction, in new artworks that welcome the listeners to share further contributions, in a continuous dialogic relationship between the performative moment and its poetic documentation.
The work of art thus becomes the score for conversations or the register of a personal, emotional and poetic relationship, enquiring with us how we can live and narrate together.
 
Mazzaro was a recipient of the Italian Council X, and previously of the ECF Courageous Citizens Research Grant and the prize Incontri Internazionali d’Arte. Artist in residence at Cité internationale des Arts (Paris), Pivô Pesquisa (São Paulo) and Residencia Artistica Faap (São Paulo), he collaborated with O Bom Retiro é o Mundo (São Paulo), the Center for Global Migration Studies and the Max Plack Institute for Ethnic and Religious Diversity (Göttingen). His work has been presented in personal projects, group exhibitions and dialogues at institutions such as Pivô, and Casa do Povo (São Paulo); La Colonie, and the Galerie de la Cité internationale des arts (Paris); Eastern Bloc, and Musée du Montréal Juif (Montreal); LADA: Live Arts Development Agency, and Tate Modern (London); Muntpunt, and Recyclart (Brussels); Spike Island (Bristol); Popps Packing (Detroit); CampoBase (Turin); Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice); Electric Eclectics Festival 2015; SuperNormal 2016, among the others.