Teaching & practice
Workshops, laboratories, seminars and public talks, mostly in Italy, Latin America and Europe: the body as an object of research and as a tool for teaching.
Practical workshops and laboratories in which the body is both instrument and object of research.
Workshop based on research into the aesthetic and cultural transposition of Gillian Hobart’s method, with reference to Weight, Space, Rhythm and Flow, applied to embodiment and polyrhythm in Afro-Latin dance and music. Bookings and information through Movimento Centrale; availability is limited.
Performance workshop on the ecotone: inhabiting the liminal edge means accepting the tension of not belonging to a single system in order to draw on the extraordinary creative and regenerative energy that only a border can generate. Hosted by Emilio Cocco (Università di Teramo, GREEN&BLUE TEK programme), Gaia Monopoli and Ottavio Di Carlo (ASD Torre del Cerrano).
A sensory experience of bioperformance in natural environments: movement, sound, bilocation and live percussion, led by Rocco Mangieri (Laboratory of Semiotics of Arts and Anthropology, Universidad de Los Andes; Sapienza University of Rome).
Virtual dance training (2019–2020) with Claudio Gasparotto of Movimento Centrale Danza (Italy) and the Teatro Libertador of Córdoba (Argentina), hosted by the Instituto di Cultura di Córdoba. The slide shows stills from participants' videos and the poster of the lab “Práctica de la D(IST)ANZA” by Rocco Mangieri (23 October 2020, in Italian and Spanish).
A sensory and ecological experience that explores the creative processes of the body through the spaces and sound atmospheres of nature.
Laboratory of body anthropology for theatre, music and dance, run as a workshop-staging with live percussion. Places are limited.
A laboratory in transcultural mediation and non-verbal performative languages that uses non-verbal signs, rhythm, gesture and play to suspend coded roles and hierarchies and open a transcultural “third space”. It offers operators, mediators and users of the Dimora d'Abramo a theoretical and practical tool for managing inter- and transcultural relations.
Teaching and public engagement in Italian and Latin American universities.
Laboratory in eight sessions (October–November 2026), taught in Italian and Spanish by Angélica Van Heiten and Rocco Mangieri. Space, body, sound, atmosphere and time converge to create, think and produce sensible universes through a diverse, integral and ecosystemic approach to the language of contemporary cinema and digital audiovisual media.
Two public talks at the Chiostro della Ghiara in Reggio Emilia: “Semiotic guerrilla warfare, fake news and artificial intelligence”, and “Space, architecture and characters in his novels: from The Name of the Rose to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana”. Presented by Rocco Mangieri, guest lecturer at UNIMORE.
An Erasmus+ fully funded Blended Intensive Programme on Sociosemiotics and Ethnography of the City, lasting one week in May 2026 at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Co-organised by University College Cork, the International Hellenic University, Universidad de Los Andes (Rocco Mangieri) and UNIMORE.
Seminar on the foundations of the theory of signification at UNIMORE, with introductions by Francesco Marsciani and Federico Montanari and talks by Enrico Barbetti, Rocco Mangieri and Tatsuma Padoan. Mangieri’s contribution is “Walking. The polyrhythmic co-production of forms of urban life”.
Talk in the series “L’Eco di Eco”, meetings and debates on the thought of Umberto Eco. It presents semiological guerrilla as a critical, decentralised form of audience resistance to the hegemonic power of the mass media, and asks where its “2.0” version is leading us in the age of fake news and AI.
Seminar in the doctoral programme in Labour, Development, Innovation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, proposing semiotic paths on the productive body and forms of life through Jia Zhangke’s film 24city. Led by Rocco Mangieri, visiting professor at UNIMORE-Reggio.
Laboratory seminar on the semiotics of objects, covering the transformation of meaning, the “second life” of things, wear and signification, the signs of impermanence, archive, memory and imagination, and the architecture and museography of presence and absence. Illustrated with Fritz Fabert’s “Archäologie der Arbeit” (2009).
Laboratory seminar on immersive museum environments: their semiotics, the ethnography and history of immersion devices, architecture and design, emotional atmospheres and multimedia design, synaesthesia, and methodologies of environmental and museographic design.
A series of slides on the figures, simple technologies and digital traces of presence.
Slide on the figures of presence, over a long-exposure photograph from the Laboratorio de Artes Integradas of the School of Dance and Movement Arts (2017; photo by Libertad Acosta).
Slide on the simple technologies of embodied presence: two people in a circle of light, their shadows cast on a screen behind them.
Slide on the digital trace of presence, over a photograph of a bare foot stepping into murky water (Katsura Isobe, Somatic Movement, 2022).
Slide on listening and being together, over blue projections of sound spectrograms (Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra, 2021).