Description
Combining artistic disciplines, Nagi Gianni likes to imagine and then create immersive spaces where choreography, set design, costumes and masks are one with the performers who inhabit them. He likes to create timeless universes inhabited by fantastical and marginal characters who operate by their own logic. Since his first creations, he has approached the mask as an extension to alter the body and its identity in relation to a given environment to confront interiority and exteriorisation, the intimate and the public. He questions the relationship to the identification of the self in the digital age, and develops in parallel a oneiric imaginary where the animal, the cyborg, the mythological and the ghostly converge. These figures of the uncanny are for him a means of opening up other relationships to the perception of reality through an approach that questions and displaces what is already known and clearly identifiable.
In addition to his personal creations, he regularly collaborates with other artists, notably Simone Aughterlony, Pétrel I Roumagnac duo, Insitute of Interconnected Realities, Maya Bösch/Cie Sturmfrei, Daniel Hellmann, Malika Frankha, Rafal Pierzyski and Maya Rochat, among others.
His work has been shown regularly in Geneva, including at the Centre d’Art Contemporain CAC, TU Théâtre de l’Usine l’Espace labo, TOPIC, le Spoutnik, as well as in various venues in Switzerland and abroad (Arsenic – Lausanne, Kabaret der Kunstler – Zurich, BONE festival – Bern, Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris, Zamek Ujazdowski CCA Warsaw, Elisabeth Garden – New York). In 2018 he is part of danceweb programm within Impulstanz festival in Vienna, the same year he was nominated for the Swiss Performance Award. In 2019 he is resident at the Ujazdowski Castle Art Centre in Warsaw. Also in 2019, he contributed to the foundation of the company HYENA, and produced his first stage piece, Antilopes (2021), co-produced with Arsenic (Lausanne) and Théâtre de l’Usine (Geneva). His second stage piece, Still Crashing (2022), was selected for the selection PREMIO’21. In 2022 his work is presented in the framework of the BLCG grants of the City of Geneva.