Scuola Piccola Zattere presents KRISTAL, a solo exhibition dedicated to choreographer and artist Cristina Kristal Rizzo, one of the leading voices in Italy’s dance and performance scene. Conceived through an exploration and activation of the artist’s archive, the exhibition situates Cristina Kristal Rizzo’s practice within the transformations of performativity from the 1990s to the present day, highlighting its distinctive character and influence: the relationship between choreographic practice and the visual arts; the use of documentation; dance as a form of thought; the centrality of the body as a site of negotiation; and a sustained attention to the conditions through which a gesture is produced, transmitted, and observed.

KRISTAL emerges from a research process developed by the artist during her residency at Scuola Piccola Zattere, together with the theorist and author Lucia Amara. The residency provided an opportunity to open the archive to multiple interpretations and reinterpretations through a collective process involving public conversations with invited guests and a series of workshops at the intersection of theory and practice, testimony and re-enactment.

The exhibition design, conceived by the architect Giuseppe Ricupero in dialogue with the artist, presents the archive as an open dispositif: a generative tool for an ongoing, evolving, and potential field of research. The archive unfolds throughout the space as a constellation of presences, without following a chronological sequence, instead taking shape through clusters, recurrences, thematic tensions, and modes of presence. Works, documents, processes, and forms of research encounter, overlap with, and diverge from one another, generating new discursive and operative configurations.

The curatorial project by Cristina Kristal Rizzo with Lucia Amara, Irene Calderoni, Edoardo Lazzari and Giuseppe Ricupero.