THE FOUNDING STORY

We travelled to Lecce to attend a conference on Third Theatre at the University of Salento, held in the presence of Eugenio Barba on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Odin Theatre and the inauguration of the living archives of Floating Islands. Dorota came from Cologne, Fabienne took the direct train from Venice to Lecce, which runs along the Adriatic coast from the North to the very South, at the 'heel of the boot' of Italy.

At the conference, we met with Leszek Kolankiewicz, a performance anthropologist and Dorota's friend, and his wife. We had dinner together, talked about ideas and projects, and we invited Leszek to a screening of Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen that we were organising for the followig month. We were planning to write a book together on the energies embodied in artistic practice, and we began to envision this project as part of a larger idea of establishing a research platform for performance and film together with our intellectual friends. During the conference, we scribbled on our notepaper possible names and acronyms for this platform. It was already in the evening, when we took the local train, a single carriage with brown benches and red curtains, to Galatina to visit the Chiesa di San Paolo and the Basilica di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria. Santa Caterina was already closed to visitors, but we were fortunate to be able to get in during the evening mass. In a small local photo museum, we bought books on Tarantism, and we went into a store, or rather a storage space, where a very old man sold elegant shoes from the 1930s to the 1960s in dusty boxes staked from floor to ceiling. We tried many of them but did not buy any. In the evening, back at the hotel, Dorota discovered a spider in her sock that had bitten her.

On the following day, we hired a car to drive to the sea. As it was off-season, there were no buses or other public transport available to reach the coast. We were almost alone when we go there. It was the day after the US presidential election and the results had just been announced. We went to the archaeological sites of the Grotta della poesia and the Faraglioni di Sant'Andrea with their limestone formations rising from the blue and emerald waters. These natural architectures, named Lu Pepe, Scala de lu bastimento, or La Punticeddha in the Salento dialect for their distinctive shapes, have been sculpted by the wind and the waves. We sat on the cliffs and listened to the sea, watching the colourful blooms of luminous jellyfish, the Pelagia noctiluca, named for their ability to emit light in the dark. Unlike other jellyfish, they do not go through a polyp stage, but are released into the sea as fully developed medusae.

Dorota took off her shoes and went down the rocks to put her feet in the water. The very moment she was kneeling, a wave broke and completely bathed her. It was 26°C that November day, so we decided not to go back to the car but to let the sun and wind dry her clothes. Fabienne loves to be by the sea, but she does not like to go in the water. So she stayed by the rocks, marvelling at their archaic shapes, bearing the sediments of time. She took photos of the landscape, including a face carved into the stone, ghostly, next to a slightly weathered carving of another face and the capital letter A. Much later, in a bookshop in Venice, she discovered a photo book entitled Acquatico e felice, with a very similar image of a face carved in stone on the cover. It shows Pier Paolo Pasolini kneeling in the sand beside the stone carving on the banks of the Tiber in Rome, taken some time between 1950 and 1955, but discovered long after his death, on an undeveloped roll of photographic film.

On our return from the sea, back in our rooms in Lecce, we bought the web domain for what we called The Institute for Performance and Film Expanded. From the pieces of limestone collected by the sea, formed from sea mud about 20.5 million years ago, Dorota chose one that looked like a flat bone, and Fabienne kept another one in an organic shape. This is how we founded The Institute for Performance and Film Expanded.