Other modes of residency
D. MAINI, N. GOKUL, S. CANTONI & S. FERRARI: BRUISED, UNDIVIDED, BACKWAYS TO THE BORDERLANDS ACCESS: PRACTICES AND HABITS
by
Dalia Maini, Noa Gokul, Saverio Cantoni & Stefano Ferrari: Bruised, Undivided, Backways to the Borderlands
Date:
Friday, 2026, September 25. 7.30 pm
Venue:
Sarean
Plaza Corazón de María, 4
48003-Bilbao
Access:
Wheelchair-accessible entrance and toilets
Bruised, Undivided, Backways to the Borderlands is a performance by Dalia Maini, Noa Gokul, Saverio Cantoni and Stefano Ferrari. It is a commission by Bulegoa z/b to Saverio Cantoni as part of access: practices and habits.*
Dalia Maini, Noa Gokul, Saverio Cantoni & Stefano Ferrari: Bruised, Undivided, Backways to the Borderlands
Bruised, Undivided, Backways to the Borderlands is a performance exploring the entanglement of disability and containment. It is conceived as a sonic fabulation centering messy and relational forms of access.
The performance traces how European borders are not only imposed from the outside, producing the human and the subhuman, but also carried inside our bodies, shaping how we move, sense, relate, and survive. This logic is extended in how medical systems, welfare structures, and bureaucracy – forms of containment that manage and administer debilitation – are absorbed, repeated, and rebuilt between one another.
Rather than offering resolution, the sonic fabulation leaves space for collective reflection, where borders can be felt, questioned, and momentarily dissolved. It embraces incompleteness, inviting the audience to become witnesses, accomplices, and emissaries of a slow trespassing – moving toward a borderland where those who refuse containment and those rendered uncontainable might meet.
The performance convenes the aesthetics of access by offering multiple ways of experiencing the work collectively, through mixed languages, sonic practices, and sensory spaces. A detailed access statement will be shared a couple of weeks before the event.
BIOS
Dalia Maini is a writer, editor, and messy organizer. Their work operates at the nexus of emancipatory politics of bodies in space, social disobedience, and civic creativity. Their research explores the sociopolitical dimensions of affect: how emotions function as sites of both oppression and resistance. They are the editor-in-chief of the street newspaper Arts of the Working Class.
Noa Gokul is a multi-medium artist, performer, composer, and healing educator, born in Oakland, California, and currently based in Berlin, Germany. Her work spans sound art, music, performance, painting, and video. Focusing on experimentation and collaboration, Noah’s practice weaves together art, healing, and liberation, and she has participated in a range of exhibitions, performances, art collectives, and speaking engagements in Europe and across the U.S.
Saverio Cantoni is a white-passing cyborg, disabled – oral Deaf – artist based in Berlin. Situating their practice in sonics, from haptic experiences to assistive technologies, Saverio choreographs sounds in several forms, mixing texts, visuals, and audible experiences. In an ongoing exploration of the “aesthetics of access,” Saverio’s practice employs multiple materials to allow audiences to approach their work from different access points.
Stefano Ferrari, aka Menion, is an Italian guitarist, composer, and producer based in Berlin. His work blends visionary electronic music with glitch, ambient, and experimental post-rock influences. He approaches sound as a descriptive narrative, using the guitar primarily as the source of a transformative process that reshapes its identity through electronic processing. Identity and its transformation become the poetic key – as well as a compositional technique – for immersing oneself in a broader sonic context that outlines a soundscape which, seamlessly, shifts between density and rarefaction, between distance and proximity. His influences include Shellac, Sonic Youth, Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, Arvo Pärt and Olivier Messiaen.
*The opposite of silence is a shockwave is commissioned by Bulegoa z/b as part of access: practices and habits, a long-term project in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Askeaton Contemporary Arts (Askeaton, Ireland), in which we aim to develop accessibility as a creative practice at the heart of our work as arts organisations. Access: practices and habits is co-funded by the European Union.
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Creative Europe. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.