Prophecies and Pronouncements

Site-specific installation – Happening Under Vesuvio 2024

At the 2024 edition of Happening Under Vesuvio, I presented a new site-specific activation of my ongoing series Prophecies and Pronouncements, a performative project that explores the physical and conceptual dimensions of language through gesture, imprinting, and installation.

This iteration revolved around two key components:

– The use of three stamps to inscribe fragments of text directly onto the skin of performers. Each stamp carried a mundane non-sybilline pronouncement updated by the presence of an erasure.

– A large printed canvas, displaying an excerpt from A Fair Share of Utopia (Jap Sam Books, 2021), installed like a suspended manifesto or silent proposal.

The canvas anchored the piece with a passage by Michelle Alexander, taken from her article “What if We’re All Coming Back?”, originally published in the New York Times and republished in A Fair Share of Utopia.

This installation did not function as a quote to be read in full, but rather as a threshold—something to pass through, to linger around, to reconsider.

The stamped bodies became temporary surfaces of meaning—marked, crossed, overwritten. The act of stamping, both mechanical and intimate, transformed the performers into carriers of disappearing language. Their movement through the space activated a score composed not of choreography, but of textual residue.

The activation of the stamps was carried out by the performers from Alessia Siniscalchi’s Sibyl Sessions, a multimedia performance that blends mythology, technology, and contemporary social commentary. Prophecies and Pronouncements was originally conceived to accompany Sibyl Sessions, and this collaboration continues to evolve, with the performers embodying the transient texts and bringing them to life through movement and presence.