Siamo molto felici di accogliere in residenza dal 3 al 25 novembre 2026 l’artista Cynthia Montier (she/her), vincitrice del progetto Culture Moves Europe, progetto finanziato dall’Unione Europea e realizzato dal Goethe-Institut.
Cynthia’s practice lies at the intersection of performance, installation, video, and affective, oral, and visual archives. She explores the relationships between ritual and care, presence and genealogy, devotion and commitment, emotion and social struggle. Drawing on social anthropology, somatic practices, divinatory techniques, and feminist pedagogies, she develops forms that attend to invisible forms of knowledge and to affective, oral, and embodied modes of transmission.
Her current research focuses on women’s practices of intercession with the afterlife, ritual weeping, mental health, and “oracular feminisms”: mediumship, possession, trance, ecstasy, and visions. She is developing a community-based project around the figures of the White Lady and the washerwoman, healing practices associated with springs and Marian apparitions, as well as psychopomp figures and animal metamorphoses in accompanying grief, crises, and rites of passage.
Since 2019, she has formed a duo with Ophélie Naessens, exploring mineral socialities, ritual pedagogies, and oracular feminisms. In 2020, she co-founded Activismes Ésotériques — Magie, Performance, Résistance with Sophie Prinssen. Since 2024, she has been developing P.G.R. (per grazia e rivoltà), a project on women’s votive and magico-religious practices, in collaboration with with IUNO and CEAAC, the Museum of Civilisations in Rome, ICPI, and the Casa Internazionale delle Donne. In 2025, her research into the Macare of Salento was presented at KORA.
Con il progetto CO-MARE, Cynthia Montier si dedica alle lacrime, alle pratiche femminili oracolari, alla guarigione e ai rituali taumaturgici legati al mare e all’aldilà. Al crocevia tra pratiche femministe di cura e autocoscienza, tecniche divinatorie e somatiche e performance, Cynthia Montier esplora le relazioni di fiducia e di trasmissione informale tra donne depositarie di saperi ancestrali, in dialogo con gli antichi culti femminili del Mediterraneo.
The title evokes cum mater, mare (sea), and comare (female friend, confidante, or co-godmother), conjuring an underground genealogy of voices, gossip, and female knowledge entrusted to the sea. Historically discredited, these forms of knowledge nevertheless remain essential to the fabric of social bonds and to navigating loss and transformation. The project invokes the Mater Dolorosa, the canonical figure of a mother who weeps for others, carry individual and collective pain.
CO-MARE brings together oracular rituals, mediumistic experiences, and altered states of consciousness. It explores ritual weeping and questions of mental health, in dialogue with feminist practices that emerged in Italy and France during the 1970s: autocoscienza (consciousness-raising), speech groups and psychofavola. Through affective, oral, and somatic archives, she interprets practices of healing, restoration, and intercession as ways to alleviate suffering, restore continuity, and navigate crises. Voices, gestures, and invisible presences thus become materials to be transmitted and reactivated, enabling us to rethink our ways of being in the world (esserci), our sense of belonging, and our shared futures.
