Where Things Bind Together

Curated by Simona Squadrito, Giulia Currà, Francesca De Chiara, and Aurora Piedigrossi, for MACTE Museum, in Termoli, in May 15, 2026.

Where things bind together is a meeting point between the practices, bodies, stories, and imaginaries of Simona Squadrito, Giulia Currà, Francesca De Chiara, and Aurora Piedigrossi. It is a shared, situated, and transformative experience, not a program, but a territory in the making; a living field of relationships, crossings, and possibilities generated through collective action and brought into being through encounter itself.

We came together, each bringing our own way of inhabiting the world and producing knowledge. We recognized in one another a common aspiration: a form of knowledge that is not possessed but inhabited; that is not transmitted from above but generated through contact, contamination, and reciprocal presence. We perceive ourselves as inhabited and transformed, both as agents and as those who are acted upon. A form of knowledge that is always body, gesture, voice, trace, threshold.

Poetry and writing become ritual, territory, landscape, not as background, but as inhabitable places. Like the rhizome described by Deleuze and Guattari, they grow horizontally, through connections and contagions, without center or periphery, without predetermined beginning or end. The rhizome is not merely a metaphor: it is a way of thinking and being in the world that overturns the vertical and hierarchical logic of Western thought, the image of the tree, the single root, the foundational principle upon which everything depends and towards which everything converges.

An entire philosophical, scientific, and theological tradition has constructed the idea of knowledge as something transmitted from the top down, reproduced through tracing and replication, imposing the verb to be and its metaphysics. The rhizome, by contrast, operates differently from the tree: it grows through lateral connections and horizontal proliferation, without a privileged center and without a predetermined direction.

Where things bind together therefore embraces the plurality of perspectives as a resource: a network made up of nodes that may be any kind of object, place, memory, gesture, or body, connected laterally and free from hierarchies between disciplines or relations of dependence between forms of knowledge. Like the rhizome, this collective experience resists partial destruction: it can be broken at any point and resume its course along other lines, like an organism that survives and regenerates precisely where it seemed interrupted.

And it is always in the middle, always among things, in between: it has neither origin nor destination, only a continuous in-betweenness, a connective tissue that replaces the binary logic of opposition with an open and multiple conjunction.

It is in this spirit that the experiences brought together at MACTE converged: not to forge unity but to proliferate, not to converge toward a center but to follow their own lines of flight, not to reproduce but to create.

Two volumes opened the day, not as objects to be presented but as devices for new connections and paths of inquiry: Inchiostro e dinamite. Antigruppo siciliano by Simona Squadrito, published by Postmedia Books, and xxx by hello.dear, published by Witty Books, conceived not as the end of a research project but as an opening to new practices. The book, the map, the gesture: tools to continue meeting, to pursue a research that does not close but branches out, that does not archive but generates.

At the center are distinct and complementary paths, which in this project have intertwined like threads of the same fabric. On one hand, the research on the Sicilian Antigruppo (Simona Squadrito) as well as Strip Practice (Giulia Currà), which in the preceding days had already given rise to a further collective experience in the project Poesia poesia portami via, organized together with PIA Independent School for Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies and the Castromediano Museum in Lecce. On the other hand, the artistic practice of hello.dear (comprising Francesca De Chiara and Aurora Piedigrossi), which, before arriving in Termoli, had traversed other spaces and communities, from Cripta747 in Turin to Radio Sherwood in Padua.

All these experiences have come together at the museum as tools for unearthing forgotten stories, inhabiting the margins as an epistemological position, and transforming the body into a living repository of gestures, memories, and knowledge. In Giulia Currà’s research, “cura” (care) is not merely an affective gesture but a political and aesthetic category; a way of being in the world and of producing knowledge together. If you move, what do you leave behind? If you move, what do you take with you? In Simona Squadrito’s research, however, it is the poetic word that becomes body, voice, and occupation of a physical and mental space, as a form of siege. Nomadic bodies in transit recreate their own home wherever they go, live in absence and desire, rethink daily life through the gestures of their ancestors, and right in the chaos, on the threshold, re-enchant the world. Reclaiming a southern, decentralized history such as that of the Sicilian Antigruppo—long ignored by the circuits of national cultural power—is not a nostalgic gesture but an epistemological act. It means recognizing that marginality is not a flaw to be corrected but a position that allows us to see differently, think differently, and produce differently. The question is not how to eliminate conflict, but how to remain within difference without ceasing to build relationships.

Intertwined with these practices is the collective construction of affective cartographies inspired by the Carte du Tendre (hello.dear): maps that do not represent territories but generate them, tracing relationships, proximities, and crossings. Territory is not a given space but a lived space, laden with experience, emotion, and feeling: emotion as an immediate impulse, feeling as its elaboration over time. Affectivity is not an individual quality but a dimension constructed within relationships, made up of dense zones and empty zones, passages and accumulations, places of arrival and places of loss, shared spaces and solitary spaces. Building a collective affective map means recognizing that the territory is never neutral: it is always traversed by bodies, affections, and stories. 

Both gestures say the same thing: it is necessary to do things differently, to practice decentralization as a method, to imagine new forms of community that can speak to the future with frank boldness.

Collectively performing our experiences, as Diana Taylor suggests, did not mean providing an abstract theoretical tool, but eliciting a wide variety of social behaviours. It is a creative act and at the same time a method for transmitting cultural memory and identities: a means for understanding the world, the dynamics of power, and their dismantling. As Taylor writes, “the power that performance has to make it possible for individuals and collectivities to re-imagine and reconfigure the social rules, codes, and conventions that prove most oppressive and harmful” (Acts of Transfer, in Performance, Politics and Cultural Memory): performance plays a vital role in the transmission of memory, in the formation of cultural identities, and in the political actions of collectivities.

Central to the evening at MACTE was the reading of a collective diary created by the artists and curators of the event, to which, at the suggestion of the museum’s director Caterina Riva, excerpts from the personal and diary writings of Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan, on display at the museum, were added: a space where everyday thoughts, images, personal fragments, and shared reflections converge, returned to the audience through readings in multiple voices. On a large white surface, a fabric laid out in the center of the room, a map emerged. Signs overlapped, interrupted one another, followed the trajectories of others, or diverged. The sound remained sparse and low-impact, consisting of voices, readings, and a gentle ambient sound diffused throughout the space. The audience was invited to bring thoughts, silences, actions: everything became part of the map, and everything contributed to keeping it alive. The closing felt as if we had all shared the same dream and were trying to tell it to one another.

What brings everything together is a shared intention towards doing things collectively: a way of acting that refuses isolation, recognises a generative resource in the plurality of bodies and voices, and chooses the margin not as a limit but as a place from which it is still possible, perhaps, to re-enchant the world. 

The fracture to pay attention to today, as Taylor reminds us, is not between spoken word and written word, but between the archive of supposedly lasting materials, texts, documents, buildings, and the repertoire of embodied knowledge and practices: spoken languages, dances, rituals, gestures. It is within this tension that the project moved, choosing the repertoire as method, the body as living archive, the encounter as a form of knowledge.

extract from the collective diary—where things bind together

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Catania, April 13, 2026 – 14:21 

it’s that I have two homes and two hearts

and two hands:

one for writing and the other

for ripping

(Rosa Maria Ancona, Parlare di sé)

…………………………………………………….
(Shh… pins coarse salt marzipan lava and chamomile)
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Paris, April 15, 2026 – 14:33

today was grandma Elodia’s birthday, we gave her the calla a yellow plant
(from a diary of mine I found again, it was 7 May 2006)

I leave you, things.
May your being missed by me be the melody
that now guides me
(Mariangela Gualtieri,Bestia di gioia)

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Paris, April 14,  2026 – 21:36
Better to be on the map of what matters than to be forgotten (…) The politics of forgetfulness requires making absence visible.

(Françoise Vergès, Like a Riot: The Politics of Forgetfulness, Relearning the South, and the Island of Dr. Moreau)

I believe in a dimension of resistance that is not only a shield against what is, but a seed of what can still be born. And in affectivity as a daily practice of presence, which restores body and voice to what risks being erased. The bond is a political gesture and shared care.

…………………………………..

Misterbianco, April 15, 2026 – 15:49  

I think of the margin.

……………………………………………………

Paris, Charles de Gaulle airport, April 17, 2026 – 21:15

 “The first duty of a woman writer is to kill the Angel in the House,” wrote Virginia Woolf. It is a powerful sentence taken up by Virginie Despentes in King Kong Théorie. I am reading it for the third time. The affectivity we have been taught is often a well-furnished cage. Unlearning it is violent, but necessary.

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Milan, Friday April 17, 2026

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Naples–Salerno, standing on the bus

What a pain in my feet and legs

The earth is hard and grey, moving on a road even greyer and harder. 

It is hard, truly

To see the sea holding Capri  like Eve’s forbidden apple

To pass under the giant crest of the mountains that hide the coast

I always thought the giants were hiding things down there before leaving 

perhaps the green soil was a blanket 

the signs of its soft folds are still there

It is hard, truly 

To know that you could draw that mountain profile with your eyes closed

and it comes back to mind every time you are far away 

And if I left… 

Perhaps I would never discover what the giants are hiding

Perhaps I would discover that I don’t have to leave at all

But these are only ifs and maybes

………….

Milan 

The traslocatrice (mover) recreates her home everywhere

She lives in lack, in unsolved debt and in desire

She rethinks her daily life through the practices of her ancestors

The traslocatrice (mover) becomes with the things and voices she collects

The depot  is her home

She tends to what people decide to let go and what becomes an object of love again

She falls in love often

She practices striptease to rethink the layers that compose her

She gossips with her friends to remember that if you touch one, you touch them all

She likes to confuse, but it is precisely in chaos and on the threshold that she always re-enchants the world

(Lack has a voice and it laments. Writing screams this lack.)

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Milan, April 19, 2026

November 8, 2017

Zehra Doğan

I have temporarily moved to a bed near the window. It is impossible to stay there without being wrapped in a blanket. We are like homeless people sleeping on the street. In prison, you understand even better the situation of those who have no home. When you sleep, not a single part of you must remain uncovered. So I sink entirely under the blanket, even my head, to avoid finding myself with a frozen nose. I seek warmth like cats do, I cannot bear such cold.

…………….

April 24, early morning – Milan 

I have always loved dawn, I feel close to it 

I often climb onto rooftops to listen to it

murmuring silence

a moment of possible compassion

it seems we could live again

to make a tomb tremble with a rose, a leaf, a whisper

the tomb must tremble and resonate

laying tears like dew on the shoulders of those who still remember and cultivate memory

the swallows arrive

the swallows always return

they seek shelter in the darkness of corners, doorframes,  of paper that moves forward without adhesive

to inhabit again

to inhabit

does it perhaps mean discovering unexplored places?

I have not returned home

the home has always remained deposited

scraps remnants of pink yellow and orange silk

The bed for orgies quiets down and seems hooked in listening

it waits and hosts, it trusts

I do not

I cannot lie down on a new bed, it seems too cold

I remember the smell of sofas

the bedbugs

the smell of smoke, of beer, the hairs in the bathtub

and my sweat in my hair

the tape makes more noise

now it seems to evoke layers

…………………….

Catania, April 28, 2026 

one year exactly           

                                      you left me 

laconic hours 

sunken again 

                                     that bottom 

deeper than the bottom

 it never convinced me 

one finds oneself again 

without understanding how

 it remains         it remains  

months

                            I am up 

the light comes through 

the one that was denied 

the windows shut not even 

the air 

May 3, 2025  I was agonizing

Missiva n.16

 the vodka consumes itself consuming me

 I read it 

          I put it down 

to make it explode 

buon appetito 

my love

…………………….

Milan

 POETRY AS WITCHCRAFT 

for confabulations to come

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Catania between April and May during the full moon in Scorpio

 The neck of the foot with a bottle in hand

 in May but it is still April

 solemn the evening found me furious

leaning forward to deflower a star 

Piero Ciampi 

The green parakeets sing, the green parakeets scream

 Your alternatives 

your violences

 you wanted that desperate face now, with such sorrow

I can only embrace you again 

Piero

The green parakeets sing, the green parakeets scream

 Your voice runs over the others

 confusing 

it in a sound I will never be able to hear again 

intent on defending myself from you

 from that person who doesn’t quite convince me

 the neck of the foot 

The body is an atrocious sublime

swine

Ciampi

 it’s not quite like that but

 I dreamed of a goat devouring a fish

 and you gutted

 these dreams of goats, flights, bicycles, whales and kerosene 

speak and they tell me 

that I see things in dreams 

you are trapped between the dust and the spoon

 and you explaining to me that life is a serious matter implored me to ignore

 your thought 

this love has devastated me

 it is only because there is nothing else

 I have returned 

to that person who doesn’t quite convince me

 the neck of the foot

……………

Paris, May 4, afternoon 

Mega Mingiedi Tunga is an extraordinary artist. Today he took me to visit his atelier: he talks to me about the Congo, about the beauty of his land and the suffering that capitalist society pretends not to see. He talks to me about humanitarian crisis, climate crisis, he asks me if we know where and how the batteries of our ultra technological phones come from. He talks to me about violence against women, about addiction crises. Mega makes maps, enormous cartographies using biro pens and collage. He studies enormously. He studies the causes, he studies the effects, he underlines the distorted colonial vision of a continent that in our Western eyes again and again and again and again. He has nothing. His maps are real and imaginary. He imagines leaving the Congo arriving in Italy (and in all the other countries of the world). And he creates bonds, connections. And I ask him: what is the most beautiful connection you have found so far?

He answers: “the people who inhabit.”

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Strip Practice, September 29, 2024

 start walking through the space and breathe

 welcome all the emotions you feel,

let fragility emerge, can you feel the skin trembling?

breathe into it and don’t seek relief 

connect the body to the space you move through 

the field is active and feels you, try to trust it

as you walk slowly feel the soles of your feet as they rest on the ground

find the breathing points of the room

in these points place, hang, or glue, scraps of fabric,

curtains or cutouts of tartan wallpaper

these squares will be your breathing points during the trasloco (moving)

as soon as you feel a sense of vertigo, move closer to them and stop to breathe 

without air,  we cannot move

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I love you my friend 

my home is yours 

be strong today 

Message from Simona Squadrito, August 31, 2023. Full moon in Pisces.

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Yellow metro in Milan, May 3, 2026

the trasloco (move) shifts ways of inhabiting 

ways of existing in the world 

sometimes it all sticks to you like slime a broken egg a trail of algae and salt 

here with the water the new load 

words stick as you walk apparently safe in the night 

gazes create pools where we can meet

 words like ants compose and rhythm infidelities 

there are those who help, those who find no peace, those who open their mouth and stuff it with witch’s syrup

there are those who hide and those you listen to, in silence 

to discover that it is possible to remain vigilant 

sometimes it all sticks to you for hours and then the weight becomes body 

(salt, honey, smell and do not be afraid to say no)

sewing skins forever 

(if I hadn’t fallen I wouldn’t have heard the sound of my bones) 

creating skeletons with small shells, crucifixions without guilt 

(hail fortune, daughter of my desire) 

……………………………………………………

Paris, May 5, 2026, 22:22 and it is pouring 

I read here Zehra Doğan 

September 30, 2017 Zehra Doğan

Sometimes I think: “One day History will write this infamy.” 

Then I think: “What if it didn’t?” Will there always and only be an official History? 

Should we wait for the powerful to write our history? 

Today we resist, but what will remain of it if we let history be written by rulers with a fascist ideology?

We will thus abdicate before the future! As long as we do not write our own history ourselves, rulers will write their versions and will succeed in annihilating us through thought. Yes, History, in reality, is not written History and cannot be reduced to events of relative importance, History is the present. It is the present moment lived by the entire universe. We must therefore take ownership of our struggle, take each other by the hand, or else, just as women have no history, one day, those who resist will find themselves stripped of theirs too. But would History be a repetition of the past?