Performance Processo (Trial-Performance) is an ongoing research-based practice that seeks to explore the potential of the trial as a means of confronting, dissecting, and negotiating institutional patriarchal power through its very mechanisms of assessment and control. Drawing inspiration from legal movies as well as Grossi Maglioni’s previous investigations into the relationship between gesture and power, the artists developed the format of the “trial-performance” to establish a space for collective engagement with politically controversial and sensitive issues such as instances of abuse within educational settings and the control over women’s reproductive health.
Central to Grossi Maglioni’s practice, the workshop component is pivotal, serving as a site for collective exchange, critical reflection and embodied research into theories, narratives and gestural expressions. By inhabiting various postures and roles within the institutional legal hierarchy, the artists and the participants interrogate the formal and symbolic mechanisms through which institutions assert power over marginalised bodies, making visible their inconsistencies and tensions as well as the possibilities for subversion. Through this embodied confrontation, institutional frameworks and protocols are performatively and materially reconstituted and re-signified.
To date, Performance Processo has evolved through a series of workshops, a performance, a radio intervention and an exhibition, each constituting a different articulation of an ongoing practice of collective negotiation. This approach transforms the artistic process into a shared space of inquiry, resistance and critical imagination, continuously expanding the discourse on power, control, and performative agency.
