Netherworld with Valentina Vella

Performance, Saturday, September 30

Doors open at 6:30pm; performance starts at 7pm

Duration: approximately 50 minutes 

Join us for Valentina Vella's first full live performance of Netherworld, an electronic album of sonic poetry about personal, existential and planetary crises. Weaving together the literary and the utterly mundane, it's vulnerable, funny and at times even danceable.

Valentina Vella makes autofictional work about precarity, mental health, love and post-capitalist imaginaries. She centers narrative and the poetic word while exploring the way the body, sound, and rhythmical patterns modulate, enrich and sometimes contradict language in performance. She holds an MA in English literature from Roma Tre University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago. She lives in Rotterdam.

Supported by CBK Rotterdam (Centre for Visual Arts Rotterdam)

We all have stories to tell that could enrich the world. This could be through gesture, a sound, or a painting, since with or without words, we are meaning-making beings. But sometimes, our voices can’t come out freely because the body is trying to keep us safe. It isn’t just acute trauma that shifts us into survival mode. Stress does that too, and in a complex, profoundly unequal and ecologically imperilled world, most of us don’t feel at ease. In this workshop, Valentina Vella will guide us through exercises based on Polyvagal Theory and somatic practices, with the aim to re-tune the body as a whole and regain control over our mental-bodily states.