OCCULTA: Co-curating Chiara Fumai's Archive
Open call to participate in workshops exploring and reactivating the archive of artist Chiara Fumai at Turin's Castello di Rivoli.
OCCULTA - Observatory for the Collective Care of Techno-Archival Languages is a participatory project promoted by the University of Turin that reactivates the archive of Chiara Fumai, a Rome-born performance artist who died in 2017. The documentary fund has been preserved since 2018 at the CRRI - Castello di Rivoli Research Center. The project aims to enhance artist archives and build shared forms of cultural memory by treating the archive as an active space for construction rather than mere preservation.
The initiative consists of two main phases:
1. Co-curating Atelier (May 2026): A series of workshops for selected participants to work directly on archival documents at CRRI and Turin cultural space Mucho Mas! Participants will develop exhibition hypotheses and devise ways of displaying materials, with results presented at Castello di Rivoli.
2. Affective Archives Workshops: Participants reflect on personal memory relationships, creating personal archives with objects, documents, and biographical traces to be shared collectively.
The project concludes in Fall 2026 with a public event at Castello di Rivoli featuring lectures in touch and speech format, designed as tribute to Chiara Fumai's performative practice. The initiative involves scholars from comparative literature, Italian studies, media, and performing arts disciplines. No artistic, curatorial, or archival skills are necessary to participate. The project is coordinated by Cristina Voto from the University of Turin's Department of Humanistic Studies and funded as a Third Mission project.