As a curatorial duo, with the UNIDEE Residency Program 2025-2026, we seek to facilitate the conditions for a collective series of rehearsals that explores languages as geopolitical spaces of dispute, narratives, and encounters. It is a call to engage with the porosity of our bodies in action and the narratives that can infuse and strengthen our practice of remaining polyphonic, amid the crumbling circumstances of the present.

Languages, Please plays on the common phrase "language, please" used to reinforce a more appropriate tone. By adopting the plural form, we shift the meaning to question the authority and the notions of correctness embedded in the structure of most languages. Our invitation to meet in languages stands as a direct challenge to domination, confronting the authority and assumed correctness of particular forms of communication: to meet in a language, indeed, embraces the paradox of feeling foreign but inside the language, consciously rejecting to be bound by borders and rules that the language itself may impose. The fragility and fleeting temporality of this process embody the very essence of the community as a political space—a plurality of possibilities forged by the acceptance of implicit differences and affective responses that sharing a language fosters in each of us. Likewise, the areas of untranslatability and misunderstanding are not obstacles, but rather essential opportunities for negotiating and reinventing the space of encounter of the language itself. As a result, in these provisional configurations, what is incomprehensible yet invisible–uncoded, unseen and unheard –is just as vital as what is comprehensible and visible.

This implies a disposition to what Pedro Oliveira and a group of students referred to as postura, a word that in Brazilian Portuguese, as well as in Italian, bears a meaning connected both to a bodily posture and to a conscious orientation that manifests in ways of being and acting in the world, blending ethical considerations with personal, cultural, sensory, affective, sociopolitical, and sometimes spiritual positions. Passing through the very relational dimension of our body–one that intersects with the effective or silenced agency of any act of co-inhabiting, reading, storytelling, talking, eating, weaving, performing, designing, speaking, walking, moving, listening, etc…, or not–this osmotic form of continuous position-taking navigates between personal attitude and collective responsibility. Following these insights towards modes of livability in other possible worlds, uncovering what has been silenced, making sense of what has been left unsaid, and activating ways of listening beyond extractive modes of understanding, knowing, or translating—we feel committed to facilitating, over the next two years, the conditions for listening beyond words, beyond taxonomy, beyond rationality, beyond metaphor.
By reimagining language protocols as open spaces where to take a position with political awareness of their presence, collective responsibility and participation—while engaging with processes that remain intentionally hidden—the modules intend to reiterate and expand on practices of finding a postura. It is about breaking the habit of synthesis, shifting our attention from the stories that worlds tell us to the intricate micro-processes that compose these stories—memories, muscles, and multiple interwoven connections occurring at once.

The narrative worlds we would like to evoke, indeed, already exist and do not need to be reinvented.
Consistently, every episode of this program is conceived as an ongoing process, where the practice of thinking merges with the exercise of reorganising the senses and meanings. Eschewing the logic of exploitation and separation and seeking to recover sustainable ways of interweaving with reality beyond linguistic codes as fixed structures, mentors, guests, and participants delve into their own strategies of reorganisation linked between others to exploring ecological practices of resistance, the reorientation of references and scales, as well as the reclamation of sequences that have historically shaped certain narratives. Languages, Please calls for work on mutable, unfixed, and temporary spaces of re-appropriation and transformation that can convey particular instances, gaining insights from counter-histories, displaced narratives, her-stories, pluriversal listenings, stories of orality, dissonance, voices, sonic storytelling, choreography, writing, translating, and co-sensing practices.

As a fundamental premise, body and language are inseparable: as means through which the identities of all subjects are negotiated and rewritten, they are sites of resistance and change. Looking at reality as composed of movements rather than immobile snapshots of spatial relations, our subjectivities are not fixed entities separated by each other. In this perspective, they are a part of a dynamic, fluid meshwork of trajectories that emerges over time, intertwining through everyday life practices. Thus, moving beyond the individual existence as an isolated experience, our environments are communicative and reactive. And our human and more-than-human bodies are constantly engaged in negotiating ecological relationships to defend our right to remain plural, precarious and complex. In the unfolding process, unpredictable encounters transform us—we are not in control, even of ourselves.

Focused on peculiar narratives as political terrains that shape the ongoing meshwork of environments, societies, and geographical spaces, we intend to amplify processes and encounters that mediate ecosystems in their biodiversity by redefining relational communicative structures: if systems influence our communication and our actions, which relate directly to what systems can support, then communities and environments can create cycles of mutual perturbation and compensation, leading to transformation.

Aware of all the implicit gaps within this nonlinear Program, we invite participants to join a series of collective, conscious training with verbal, non-verbal, human, more-than-human, sonic and non-cochlear stories, aimed at strengthening our attempt of attuning in polyphony. It is an invitation to dive into what it could mean to engage with sustainable acts of storytelling, reception, and the reclamation of spaces of coexistence—an ongoing, heterogeneous multiplicity of stories so far, in which collective imaginaries emerge from the reorganisation of the senses, rewriting and acting for justice, rather than from resonance or empathy.

Our work is rooted in a path of alliances and interweaving that the UNIDEE Residency Programs began before us, that will continue, and is embedded in its own context of Biella, referring directly to its economic, political, and material history, explores the metaphorical connection between textiles, threading, and narration, strongly developed by Latin American thinkers. Broadening the curatorial framework into a duo permits us to embody plurality within the Residency Programs, as a cautionary tale of the importance of contradiction, realms of opacity, and negotiation within the ecosystems we operate in. This is an integral part of the enduring legacy of the UNIDEE Residency Programs: from previous Visiting Curators, we have inherited a compass to explore collective cultural work rooted in pluriversality, resilience, and anti-hegemonic transformation. Together, we are committed to furthering this exploration.

To trace multiple trajectories, and to insist on their presence avoiding the neutralization of the stories inherent to the spaces and the people gathering in Biella, is the primary objective of our work. As Elvira Espejo Ayca stated, a textile can be considered a person: beyond its visible presence, it is important to remember that every subject is constituted by various fields of forces and the interconnections between them.

Nina Fiocco and Gaia Martino
UNIDEE Visiting Research Curators 2025/26

In the text we refer to the ideas of Yasnaya Gil Aguilar, Rosi Braidotti, Gloria Anzaldua, Karen Barad, Doreen Massey, Anna Tsing, Tim Ingold, Pedro Oliveira and Elvira Espejo Ayca, among others.


The open call for participation in the first season of the 2025/26 Modules is online.