COREOGRAFARE VENEZIA: Ri-scrittura urbana e sopravvivenza dell’effimero nelle mappe di Virgilio Sieni

This paper examines a series of maps created by Virgilio Sieni between 2013 and 2016, during his tenure as director of two editions of Biennale College – Dance within the Venice International Festival of Contemporary Dance. Drawing on Sieni’s notion of drawings as a “map of mysteries,” the paper argues that do-it-yourself editorial materials are able both to retain the affective charge of performance and to extend the life of choreographic and curatorial projects beyond their live temporality. The maps translate onto paper Sieni’s imagined choreographic topographies of Venice, generated through the haptic and affective knowledge of performers’ and spectators’ bodies. Preserved as ephemera in the choreographer’s personal archive, these drawings function as rhythmic sequences open to revision and reworking. Rather than offering precise documentation, they visualize a choreographic way of thinking that re-narrates the city through gestures, movements, and encounters, allowing “delayed spectators” to access the event and enabling performance to escape the ontology of ephemerality. Positioned at the intersection of dance and performance studies, visual culture, criticism, and publishing studies, the paper proposes these maps as speculative editorial objects that articulate Sieni’s compositional thinking and his choreographic rewriting of Venice, offering new ways to understand how performance survives across time, space, and media.