“Talamo” [from lat. thalămus] is an Italian word with multiple meanings. Since the classical age it has indicated the bridal chamber and in literature and poetry, by extension, the nuptial bed. In mediaeval representations it was the stage on which liturgical dramas were performed, while in anatomy it denotes the central part of the brain.

It is our bodies’ information relay station: it processes the sensory signals – including motor signals – before sending them to the brain’s cerebral cortex for interpretation. It also plays a role in sleep, wakefulness, consciousness, learning and memory.



Within the premises of BASE, TALAMO is a performative – hanging and inhabitable – sculpture, trying to take on all these nuances.

It is an immense but light bed, which becomes a room without delimiting a volume, without ever enclosing it.

A soft, fluid landscape takes shape through its incessant movement between floor and ceiling, shaped by the force of gravity and the interactions with various bodies – which alter, or rather create, its topography.

A restless stage that originates, first with the performers arisandmartha and then involving the public, fantastic choreographies and configurations – blurring the boundaries between inanimate matter and human bodies. Everyone is free to express and reinvent their own gesturality, within a small, convivial architecture – which embraces everyone’s physicality and projects it within a dimension of renewed collective confrontation.

TALAMO is an ergonomic mirror, a cathartic device for everyone’s differences: a place to claim one’s identity, but at the same time where to construct dialogues, learning to accept oneself and others. In its continuous making and unmaking, TALAMO is therefore a living artefact – in a restless state – conscious of how complicated it is to build shared languages that yet allow for heterogeneity, while rejecting sameness.