Federica Nicastro ~ Softer, it crumbles
Federica Nicastro's "Softer, it crumbles" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 1, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Federica Nicastro's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
Softer, it crumbles
Federica Nicastro's question: What could unfold, after it leaks?
Federica's introduction: Softer, it crumbles is a restitution in more than one partition, part score for a hypothetical sound piece, part gray, confidential literature. Without resolution, is a textual disorientation that sustains emotional rifts, hesitations and porous forms of communication between a sender and a receiver. Built realities are the starting points, sites and scenes develop through the voice. Speak closely, and given meanings will crumble, becoming touch. An assembled, fractioned, disorganized research on the failure of a missed proximity, the unbearable, the unvoiced and the residual, the infrastructures of the intimate and their normative conventions. Or this is the framework through which a series of premises and interludes could be opened.
Bethany's report: The performance begins with an empty stage and a voiceover that carries the audience through its entire duration. The voice describes the space with meticulous precision: from its measurements, objects, and even the air, thick and humid, filled with unspoken thoughts. The tone is intimate but distant, painting a picture of a world suspended in gray, where silence and expression struggle against each other. The narration introduces a situation, an interaction between artist and viewer, described as “we are.” It reflects on shared thoughts and the difficulty of speaking, as if words might betray intent. The performance becomes a space in itself, a structure built to hold expression, like constructing a house out of memories. Yet, it questions whose desires this space contains—yours? Theirs? Both?
Distance and spatiality take on emotional weight as the voice explores how relationships and communication are shaped by the spaces between us. It speaks of the intimacy within these gaps, where expression stumbles and chokes, caught between what is intended and what is understood. The voice addresses “you,” but it’s unclear who this “you” is—audience, artist, or someone else entirely. The ambiguity leaves room for interpretation, for reflection on what is spoken, withheld, or released.
The performance plays with language and sound, layering gestures of speech, repetition, and texture. Words are described as “mounted breath,” fragile and fleeting. Moments of whispering, hesitations, disrupt the stillness, creating a dynamic rhythm of communication. The voice is soft, deep, and deliberate, materializing feelings that linger long after the words have been spoken. What emerges is a reflection on the nature of expression and how we try to communicate, the ways we falter, and the gaps we leave behind. It explores the tension between structuring communications and allowing disorder to shape our understanding, likening this to a kind of divination: finding meaning in the unpredictable. By the end, the stage remains empty, yet filled with remnants of sound, breath, and space.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon reflected deeply on the performance, framing it as an exploration of the gap between expression and intention—a space charged with complexity and rich in possibilities. He began by identifying how intention arises from thought, which itself is a reduction of experience. For Ramon, thoughts are shaped by the body, acting as a perceptual lens that both generates and limits expression. This connection between mind and body opens up what he called a “rich, deep conversation” about their relationship and the persistent gap that exists between them.
Ramon turned to Frantz Fanon to articulate this gap further, discussing the struggle to be authentic to oneself while contending with external imperatives such as race and gender. He noted how intention, shaped by internal processes, can be distorted by externally imposed systems. As these distortions accumulate, Ramon described, the entire system of thought and expression can become clouded, as if walls were closing in, trapping the self in a contaminated view of existence. Fanon’s critique of Freud resonates here, as Ramon highlighted the idea that we are born into preconditioned structures—systems that shape us long before we can shape them. He likened this experience to surviving in a polluted river, questioning how we can separate ourselves from such contamination while existing within it.
Ramon grappled with this "impossible possible existence," likening the gap between intention and expression to the challenge of separating a wave from the ocean. He introduced Simondon’s philosophy, describing how the gap itself serves as a signal—a reminder of both human greatness and humility. For Ramon, this duality—the particular and the universal—invites compassion and empathy, encouraging us to see beyond the contaminated river that society falsely frames as the ultimate reality.
Drawing connections between Simondon and Fanon, Ramon reflected on how these structuralist thinkers continue to haunt contemporary life. He emphasized that to be alive is to inhabit an enclosed space, one defined by incompatibility and contingency. Yet, Ramon saw this reminder of human limitation not as a failure but as a source of uniqueness and potential. He suggested that leaning into the discomfort of this gap between intention and expression can lead to an affirmative way of living—one where we can embrace our imperfect environments and think, “I am the most prolific swimmer there has been.”
Ramon concluded that the performance is deeply political, challenging societal pressures to be quiet, clear, and easily understood. Life, as Ramon described it, is anything but linear or comprehensible. The performance, with its exploration of dissonance and complexity, raises questions about what it means to live freely within our own corners, spaces, and environments. For Ramon, this unformable, unresolved existence is where true freedom and life can be found.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia described the performance as a phantasmagoric lecture, inspiring in its exploration of presence and absence. Initially unsure if she could even "see" the performer, her eventual awareness of the artist’s presence deepened her engagement with the work. This interplay between visibility and invisibility resonated with Antonia’s own experiences of creating and organizing performance, particularly a piece she co-presented on the Bosnian genocide. She recalled how, after performing behind a black curtain in a large hall, she emerged to find few audience members remaining. For Antonia, this was a stark reminder of how difficult it is to hold focus on narratives that are both intimate and politically heavy.
Reflecting on this, Antonia drew parallels to the performance, noting how the artist’s shifting presence onstage—sometimes absent, sometimes embodied—transformed the experience from a fixed noun into "a very long verb." This fluidity of meaning prompted Antonia to consider how grammatical structures inherently shape how we understand and contain meaning. She referenced Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native Canadian theorist and scientist inspired by Indigenous cosmologies, whose work explores the "democracy of species" and the linguistic differences that influence how we see the world. In Kimmerer’s language, unlike English, most words are verbs rather than nouns. For example, there is no static "river," but rather "the being of the river" or "the rivering of the river," emphasizing a continuous process of becoming. For Antonia, this "verbing" is where the performance’s signal resides, in the oscillation between presence and absence.
Antonia situated the performance in a space she described as architectural, modern, and thick—a space that retains memory in its cyclical phases of tenderness and violence. She connected this undulating movement of presence and absence to the idea of "unkeptability," which for her can only occur if one resists fixing things into nouns. This refusal to stabilize meaning into a singular identity invites viewers to exist in the dynamic "in-between."
She also brought in Paul B. Preciado’s work on queer cartographies, particularly the critique of ontologically stable entities and nouns. Preciado’s notion of “bitch cartography” resonated with Antonia’s interpretation of the performance, focusing on the spaces between nouns—those undefined, fluid territories that resist containment and affirm continuous transformation.
For Antonia, the performance illuminated how language and structure shape our perception of presence, absence, and identity. The oscillation between the visible and the invisible, the static and the fluid, mirrored her reflections on being, witnessing, and the impossibility of fully capturing a moment, body, or thought within a fixed framework. This refusal of stability, this focus on the "verbing" of existence, was where the performance found its resonance for Antonia—a space where meaning continually unfolds rather than settles.
Inti Guerrero: Inti described the performance as a voyage across genres, blending elements of academic essays with footnotes, moments of poetry, and layered subjectivities coming together. He noted how the form was formally kaleidoscopic, shifting between different registers and perspectives, creating a complex and multifaceted experience.
For Inti, the architectural space within the narrative felt more dystopian than modernist. He interpreted the bourgeois setting as a dystopian site of eavesdropping, brilliantly suited to the performance’s context. Inti particularly appreciated how the piece explored the bodily and spatial nature of language—how utterances can take on sculptural qualities, transforming words into objects. This interplay of signal and noise, of who is recognized as a speaking subject versus dismissed as mere noise, resonated deeply.
Referencing Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Inti connected the performance to larger questions of voice, agency, and the violence of colonial structures. He reflected on Spivak’s observation that the English word "subject" simultaneously produces three meanings: the individual, the object, and the subjugated. Inti noted how this layered understanding of subjectivity emerges in language, where these three meanings coexist and interact every time a subject speaks—or is denied the ability to speak.
To exemplify these ideas, Inti referred to the history of ethnographic expeditions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where positivist scientists constructed the "subject" of their research. These projects produced subjects of history and science while subjugating Indigenous knowledge and ways of being. Inti emphasized how the feminist and postcolonial perspectives engaged in the performance provided a powerful critique of this legacy, navigating the layers of silence, voice, and power embedded in structures of colonialism.
AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 ~ Chameleon Orbit
About: Federica Nicastro