Genazzano Project (1981-1984)

This collection brings together the interviews conducted within the framework of the research on the Genazzano Project (1981–1984), an artistic and cultural experience developed in the town of Genazzano (Rome), which, over a period of approximately three years, involved Italian and international artists, cultural operators, local administrators, and members of the local community.

The corpus has been assembled and further developed in close connection with the volume Oral History, Archives, and Site-Specific Theatre: The Genazzano Project, currently in publication with Routledge. The interviews thus form a central component of the research, contributing not only as documentary sources but as a primary field of inquiry through which the project has been reconstructed and interpreted.

Emerging from the encounter between the Camion company led by Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, the local administration, and a complex network of artists from different fields (visual arts, music, theatre, performance), the project took shape as an ongoing laboratory rooted in the urban and social fabric of the town. Rather than a festival or a sequence of events, it unfolded as a continuous working process, grounded in co-presence, collaboration across artistic languages, and a direct relationship with spaces and with the local community.

Between 1981 and 1983, Genazzano became a site of experimentation in which heterogeneous artistic practices intertwined with everyday life: the Castello Colonna, the Ninfeo del Bramante, public squares, streets, and other urban spaces were progressively reactivated through performative, installative, and musical interventions, giving form to a diffuse and non-centralised project. The participation of the local community—residents, artisans, and administrators—constituted a structural component of the project, shaping both its modes of production and its forms of reception and memory.

The interviews collected here reflect this complexity through a plurality of perspectives. The corpus includes testimonies from artists involved in different phases of the project, collaborators and organisers, institutional figures, and numerous inhabitants of Genazzano who took part, in various ways, in the experience. Particular emphasis has been placed on local voices, in order to reconstruct how the project was perceived, experienced, and re-elaborated within everyday life.

The interviews were conceived and conducted as site-specific practices: in many cases carried out in the very locations of the project (homes, public spaces, historically connected sites), they function as situated devices for the activation of memory, in which the relationship between narrative, space, and experience plays a decisive role in the construction of testimony.

Taken together, this body of oral sources constitutes a stratified and dynamic archive that underpins the reconstruction advanced in the Routledge volume, documenting not only events and works, but above all the processes, relationships, and lived experiences that gave shape to the Genazzano Project.

• Donatella Orecchia
• Arianna Morganti

• MAP – Centro interateneo per la Memoria del Teatro - https://www-2023.centromap.uniroma2.it/