Xristina Penna
Xristina Penna is a performance designer, researcher and lecturer. She has worked as a designer for plays, devised and site-specific performances, and events (www.xristinapenna.com).
As a scenographer (xristina penna+aswespeakproject) she works with mixed-media, handmade bizarre objects, inefficient aesthetics and material stemming from the audience to create hybrid collaborative performance installations and actions, which she calls contraptions. Her research tests how participatory performance processes can be informed by neuroscience theories of human consciousness and cognition to facilitate collaborative thinking through audiences, space and materials. Her scenography work has appeared at Currents 2013, USA | The Bluecoat, Liverpool | The Benaki Museum, Athens | Shunt Vaults, London |The Roundhouse, London
Image credit: Brian Sayle
Featured Work
TO YOU <-> TO ME
In the project ‘To You, To You, To You: Love Letters to a (Post) Europe’, artist/curator Lisa Alexander invited artists to respond to a provocation including the phrase to ‘gather and to respond with the action, idea or form of a love letter'.
My immediate response to the provocation was to create a scenography asking from the audience to perform an unconditional act of love towards me, the performer on stage. The scenographic action therefore ‘To You To Me’ used cord, fabric, and trust, to express my need to be lifted and supported at a personal and national fragile and precarious moment in time.
