Oct 30

Oct 30 ROXY CERON: LIMINAL ZONE

Roxy Ceron is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves across moving image, performance, sound and installation, often exploring states of transition and unstable perception. Curated by Anna Vittoria Maga and developed within her residency at Casa degli Artisti in Milan this year, Liminal Zone emerges from this research as an evolving project in which bodies, symbols and environments inhabit the threshold between the archaic and the contemporary, the material and the digital.

Threshold as a place to stay

In Ceron’s poetics, liminality is depicted as a metamorphic field and a permanent state of transition. Not simply the moment between two states, but a condition in which transition itself becomes a new state of the self.

Drawing on the speculations of Victor Turner, we can see the liminal subject as something that sits “betwixt and between”, where identity loses stability and existence feels unresolved.

Categories are suspended, so the threshold becomes a “realm of pure possibility”, as the anthropologist himself states in The Forest of Symbols, from which new relationships and configurations of the self can emerge.

But when certain elements of liminality become not only temporary, but institutionalised corners of experience, how long can we stay at this crossroads of transformation? Or maybe, how long can this oscillatory movement stay in us?

Perhaps, before leaving, we should wait for us to recognize ourselves or become something different entirely.

Sacred Geometries and Sacred Bodies

We entered a field that implies transformation in a specific sequence: passage - unbinding of the self - reconstruction. But it’s not always what really happens.

The disgregation can become the new established identity, a perpetual state of schismogenesis of the self. Reconstruction never occurs.

In this space we can meet two threshold presences, performed by Elena Francalanci and Katya Kabalina, inhabiting and guarding the passage. Their collaboration with Ceron also grew out of the contrast between their different backgrounds and personalities, each resonating with different dimensions of the project and becoming part of its internal tension.

Their choreography becomes a network of intertwined relationships: bodies, gestures and individual approaches are connecting, overlapping and embracing within the same space of expression.

The costumes extend this dialogue into the construction of the figures themselves. Developed by Anna Luisa Di Lauro from Ceron’s text and references to experimental cinema, the costume concept emerged through the research of organic transparencies and merging shades.

As totemic figures, Elena and Katya enact like dynamic points of tension moving in a geometric cosmic ritual, a choreography of pauses and almost neurotic movements. Through embodiment and repetition, they activate the cathartic journey, mimicking both ancestral and organic daily gestures in a performance of presence.

The two figures can be read through Arpad Szakolczai’s notion of the trickster, particularly through the liminal and ambivalent figure of Hermes.

Once we’ve entered the liminal space and introjected its dynamics, we tend to adapt to the personas and structures we meet in this environment, ambiguous threshold presences, capable of guiding and destabilising at the same time in a permanent way.

Within this field of tension, the relationship between movement and music becomes central. Dance is understood as a form of writing with the body in space and time, in dialogue with other compositional forces such as music, geometry of the gaze and visual codes, in resonance with some of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's choreographic research.

Intratemporal consistencies

Liminal Zone does not stage a collision between past and present, but a temporal coexistence in which archaic symbols and contemporary visual devices become part of the same symbolic framework.

Archaic, ritual, symbolic, and surrealist elements are not cited as artifacts of the past, but reactivated by shiny technological tools within the popish Y2K MTV grammar, not for mere nostalgia, but as a catalytic medium that turns an innested and shared gaze into a tool for decrypting a cosmic message.

The original music by Jacopo Sacchi gives the atmosphere its pulse and emotional core, becoming one of the main vessels through which the liminality takes shape, beautifully hyperlinked to Murray Schafer‘s idea of soundscape: a sonic environment in which individual sounds, textures, and frequencies become part of a larger perceptual field.

Sound resonates with the energy of the different textures and materials present on the liminal field, layering intensity and unsettling yet familiar vibrations, stretching the fabric of time until everything can coexist at the same time and produce perpetual possibility.

Liminal Zone does not end with a single work. Conceived as an evolving platform for research, experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration, it extends the logic of the threshold beyond the image itself: each new encounter, medium and context can become another temporary configuration of the same field.

That research is already moving into a new chapter. During a six-month residency at La Cap Re-hub, in collaboration with Galleria Ipercubo, Ceron is developing a new work alongside Gaia Ginevra Giorgi, La Musa II and Jacopo Sacchi. The project will further expand Liminal Zone as a digital archive under constant construction and transformation, bringing us back to the threshold with a wider perspective, not to resolve it, but to see what else can emerge there.