Nicole Ranzato

“We see through the eyes and touch through the hands
of all people. Thinking is an embodied and collective
activity. (...) Perhaps our hands, too, can intertwi-
ne, reassembling through touch a collective thinking
body.”
- Ėval’d Vasil’evič Il’enkov

The work reinterprets documentation of a waacking/punking improvisation. Through an analytical, close-up editing process, bodies are
fragmented to foreground gesture: movements
that mirror one another, chase each other, flirt with the self, and trace precise trajectories through space.

Playground Love is a performative intervention conceived for the spaces of the
Cotonificio at Iuav University of Venice.
Structured as a participatory treasure hunt, the project invites participants to
navigate traces of adolescent fantasies, desires, crushes, and imaginaries that emerged during their school years and were
later suppressed or forgotten. Love letters, diary entries, notes, and confessions
become devices for reactivating memory,
allowing dormant desires and unrealized
possibilities to resurface.
Through these displacements, Playground Love activates an affective rereading of the university environment, invi-
ting incidental audiences to perceive the space from unexpected perspectives shaped by traces of desire and fantasy.

The Novecento Museum of Florence is a spa-
ce rich in history, once inhabited by cloistered nuns, whose community ceased to exist in
the seventeenth century with the conversion of the building to only function as a hospital.
The story has prompted us to reflect on forms
of self-exile liberating, where closure is translated into force agglomerator and crumbling at the same time, able to unite different modes of being and being. In this space of infinite potential, Love Hangover accompanies the attempt to keep together the experience of isolation of nuns with the utopian visions of
convents proposed by Margaret Cavendish in her book The Convent of Pleasure of 1668.

This workshop introduces students to the practice of hand reading, drawing on
Sam Dolbear’s Hands that touch this fortune Will and selected film excerpts. Hand reading is approached not as a method of interpretation, but as a way to connect with another person, often an occasion for subtle flirtation, an exercise in attentive
presence.