Artist residencies, which are central to the dance ecology of the E’BAL network, are designed as retreats from the pressures of everyday life to give space and time for thought, research, exploration and creation. Sometimes they are much more than that though: not just a place to get away from it all, but a place to get into, central to the work itself.
Such is the case with Violetta Cottini and the heavenly Arboreto residency space just outside the village of Mondaino, with its rustic guesthouse and enchanting Teatro Dimora. For Cottini (her second residency here), it’s a place where nature and nurture come together – a theme that is core to her artistic work.
The Arboreto residency space lies in an expanse of 9 hectares of woodland. A former foresters’ hut was converted to a guesthouse in 1998; a little further down the hillside, almost camouflaged among the trees, is the enchanting Teatro Dimora, which opened in 2004. Its materials and architecture were designed to blend with and be open to its arboreal surroundings. The whole Arboreto was imagined as a haven where creativity, performance and nature could meet and merge.
“It is perfect for me,” says Cottini. “These woods are very special, and very connected to my research.” She has been working with camera traps – infrared cameras set in the woodlands that can capture the ghostly images of nocturnal animal life – and using the strange images and the feelings they engender in her creative work. In 2024, her project was about fairies and fairytales, the way that we imaginatively populate the landscape with creatures that we cannot see but we sense are there – just like an infrared camera sees the forest in a different way than we can. The cameras in the forest were foundational to her process: “The infrared vision of the camera trap is like a portal to another dimension.”
As we speak, I notice her the ghostly photography on her t-shirt – and yes, these were from her 2024 piece that emerged here, Do Fairies Have a Tail? She did a sharing with the public in Teatro Dimora one afternoon, and at the end of the performance the curtains rose and the audience exited into the woods – a perfect way to transition from the theatrical into the natural.
Currently Cottini is nurturing another piece here, also about fantastical creatures: this time, it’s not just tiny beings, it’s also dragons. Its title, Fey, suggests many things for her, not just the enchanted and the ethereal but fate itself – that fact, simultaneously unknowable and unavoidable, that we are doomed to die. Again, the camera traps in the forest are fundamental. “The cameras access a nature that is invisible to us,” says Cottini. “What is this ‘elsewhere’? Where do we go when we enter it? Is it real or not real?”
Such richly suggestive questions of existence, mortality and mystery cluster around Cottini’s work like moths. “We spend a lot of time in the woods,” she says. “Always during the daytime, but also at night. At night it is very strange and mysterious. It’s dark and our senses and perceptions are very open. It can be scary, because everything feels amplified. But this is part of our research and practice.”
All this talk makes me want to see the performance – at Arboreto. I love the idea of delving into a world that mixes fantasy and imagination with questions of mortality and mystery – and connects them to the reality of nature itself. Nurturing this kind of artistic work needs a special place. L’Arboreto really is that.
For more on L’Arboreto, listen to our audio episode ‘A veritable variety of versatile venues’
