Performance: Adelaide Cioni

Adelaide Cioni, Five Geometric Songs

For its 2025 edition, Arte Fiera has renewed (for the third year) its collaboration with Fondazione Furla for the live performance program curated by Bruna Roccasalva, the Foundation’s Artistic Director.

This year, the invited artist was Adelaide Cioni (b. Bologna,1976), who presented a performance created for the exhibition.

Adelaide Cioni’s work regards the origins of the sign. Although her research covers a wide range of expressive forms - including painting, literature, music, and theater - her starting point remains drawing.

At Arte Fiera 2025, Cioni presented Five Geometric Songs, a performance in which abstract geometric motifs become the visualization of rhythm in space by means of five costumes designed by the artist and worn by five dancers who perform to original music by Dom Bouffard.

The result of Cioni’s longtime focus on abstraction and color, on the origin of shape, and on the concept of patterns, the performance was both an evolution of a previous performance, Song for a Square, a Circle, a Triangle (2023) and a response to its specific location in Bologna: the Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau (1977), a faithful reproduction of an original design by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for the 1925 Exposition International des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, exactly 100 years ago.
Cioni has taken into consideration the relationship between colors and the pure geometric shapes of the Padiglione’s architecture, creating her personal composition of geometries and colors that interweave with the spaces, highlighting their fluidity and intersecting with their volumes.

Starting from a reflection on abstract decorative motifs both in nature and in artistic objects from all eras, Five Geometric Songs elaborates these shapes and merges them with music and dance in a work that became an investigation of body and language, space and movement.

Adelaide Cioni (b. Bologna, 1976) studied drawing at UCLA and received her degree in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (2015). She has received master’s degrees in modern history and in literary translation, translating American literature for ten years before devoting herself entirely to art. She has participated in numerous group shows and has had solo shows in galleries and public institutions in Italy and abroad. Her most recent performances include Touch Song, Southwood Gardens, Piccadilly, London (2024); Song for a Square, a Circle, a Triangle, Mimosa House, London (2023), and Prayers to Jupiter, Fondazione Memmo/Gasworks, London (2022).
 

The performance took place in Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau in Piazza della Costituzione 11, at the following times:

• Thursday 6 February at 4, 5, 6 PM
• Friday 7 February at 11 AM and 12 N
• Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 February at 11 AM, 12 N, 1 PM

Each performance lasted about 45 minutes and entrance was free of charge and without reservation, including on 6 February.