In Bodies and Words, Alessandro Risuleo orchestrates a visual symphony where body, gesture, and material merge until the boundaries of identity begin to dissolve. In collaboration with choreographer Mvula Sungani, the artist creates images born from the language of dance—yet transcending it—sculpting movement into liquid, almost painterly forms.
The two dancers’ bodies—tense, entangled, at times nearly impossible—are wrapped in a fluid substance developed by Risuleo himself: a material akin to paint that fuses with the skin, amplifying muscle tension, rhythm, and spatial composition. It is as if flesh becomes calligraphy, and movement begins to write unspoken words into the air. Hence the title: Bodies and Words.
These images never seek aesthetic balance. Instead, they inhabit a space of unease, suspended between attraction and repulsion, where the human form becomes totem, sign, spiral. As in the choreographic drawings of Trisha Brown or the muscular abstractions of Robert Mapplethorpe, the body here is a mutable architecture—a language of matter and tension.
There is no linear narrative, only a visual flow that seems to rise from the body’s subconscious. Each frame becomes an emanation: of gesture, of desire, of encounter. Bodies and Words is a project not to be read, but to be heard with the eyes—a poem written in skin.
