Out of Focus: workshop

The Out of Focus workshop took place in Genoa in February 2024, during the artistic residency of Divago Festival, curated by Mixta. The experience was conceived as a collective device for urban crossing, with the aim of questioning the functional models that reduce the city to a mere passage from point A to point B. Via del Campo and the former Jewish ghetto, places marked by historical stratifications and often perceived as “dangerous” at night, became the ground for an investigation into perception and the cultural construction of fear, amplified by the absence of public lighting.

The workshop unfolded in two phases. The first focused on sensory activation and listening, through exercises in bodily awareness and practices dedicated to the visual field, with particular attention to peripheral vision: what inhabits the threshold of sight and is usually excluded or marginalized. This element became a crucial conceptual node: Out of Focus did not merely interrogate what is visible, but foregrounded what is obscured, displaced to the margins, or rendered invisible by the control devices of contemporary society.

In the second phase, participants inhabited the streets of the former ghetto at night, experimenting with the relationship between the body and public space in the absence of light. The questions that guided the practice were simple yet radical: what happens if I stop in a dark alley? What reaction does my presence provoke? What sounds emerge when the city goes silent? In this way, the exploration destabilized the dichotomy between safety and danger, opening the possibility of a relation with the unknown, with darkness, with alterity.

From the workshop emerged visual, sonic, and textual materials — smartphone photographs, environmental recordings, and free word associations around the notions of threshold and darkness. These fragments later became the foundation for the project’s formal restitution: an environmental installation inside the deconsecrated church of San Marcellino and a fanzine publication.