Marcus Borja

Actor, author, director and musician, Marcus Borja will be staying at Villa Medici in spring 2021 for an artistic project between stage and museum.

The project of my residency at Villa Medici revolves around the conception and development of transdisciplinary Franco-Italian projects highlighting the relationship between the living arts (theater, music, dance, performance) and the museum/exhibition space.

Taking as a basis the notion of chorality in the broadest sense of the term, the aim is to examine the theatricality of the expographic space (museum, art center, historic site) in order to draw out a dramaturgy that invokes and integrates live performance. In a space-time where the organic and the static, the ephemeral and the durable, the transitory and the permanent, come into contact (and even clash), one re-signifies the other and, while shattering its boundaries, this relationship opens the way to new ways of looking at works of art and to a deterritorialization of the artistic experience through the sharing and setting in motion of poetic spaces. Just as the sound and dance bodies of the actor-singer-performers give movement to the fixed materials of the works of art with which they interact, the latter constrain and stimulate the bodies and interactions of the former at the heart of a complex composition open to the public space.

I’d like to get in touch with art and history centers in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, who are thinking about the relationship between exhibition space and live performance in different ways, and forge partnerships – the forms of which we’ll have to invent together. What can I learn from their experiences and suggest – on the artist’s side – resonances and creative paths?