Manifesto

Organised as a series of interconnected segments, Manifesto intertwines written, performative, and conceptual techniques. It engages the reader directly, encouraging participation and creating a temporal interplay between presence and resonance.

The work foregrounds the materiality of language—letters, ink, pixels—while presenting reading as a collaborative, performative act. Drawing on media ecology (McLuhan, Flusser), it questions the idea of writing as fixed or stable (Benjamin).

Its multilingual texture (English, Italian, German) functions as a semantic “glitch,” prompting moments of self-interrogation and ambiguity. Words and sounds shift meaning through rhythm, repetition, and assonance: Manifesto echoes Mephisto; Io sono Manifesto suggests both “I am the manifesto” and “I am manifested”; Il significato becomes both “meaning” and “the signified.” Iteration (“again,” “wieder”) creates a ritornello effect (Deleuze), allowing the text to persist beyond the page. The em dash acts as a threshold—an opening into slippage, echo, and ontological deviation.

In its climactic moment, the performer uses the poem as a mask, speaking through the sheet of paper as if “possessed” by language itself. This produces a distorted, vibrating voice that evokes the tremor beneath articulation.

The final segment dissolves into pure phoné—breath, voice, and sound—ending with an open question of participation (“Who?”). Voice becomes a life-affirming act of saying without fixed meaning (il dire senza il detto, Beckett).

Manifesto invites the audience to become sympoietic co-creators (Haraway, Barad), initiating an ongoing cycle of interpretation, vocalisation, and presence. Straddling poetry, performance, and conceptual writing, it offers an embodied exploration of language as relational, emergent, and alive.

The project is part of the subthemes Hybrid Selves – Gender, Identity, and Posthuman Intimacies, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.