Filippo Andreatta

In 2022, I began studying clouds, the ephemeral element par excellence. This research – part of a ten-year journey transfiguring outer landscapes into inner ones on stage – took its first shape in September 2024 as an installation and its second the following month with the premiere of a musical theatre show that crystalised the breaths of Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich into clouds. Evanescent as a cloud, this research constantly changes shape while remaining unchanged in its name: nuvolario [transl. Cloud atlas].

Clouds continue to be a fascinating and powerful element for me, and, at the Saari Residence, I intend to develop further steps for nuvolario and the elusive vertigo of celestial landscapes and their precipitate into our present.

Far from being only an idyllic image, clouds are visible only from a distance. If you get too close, they conceal themselves and the atmosphere by becoming tangible. Although evanescent, clouds are the negative of the atmosphere and are linked to environmental, social and economic issues: from cloud seeding to the Cloud for our data, from military studies to hallucinations.
By embracing a slower pace, I will take time and space to observe the Finnish sky and write scattered notes that will later find shape on stage or as a book. I don’t come to the Saari Residence with a clear idea about what to do, but rather with my head in the clouds. I will be popping into places to meet the local community with the hope that this will nourish my research and its outcomes.

Filippo Andreatta (Rovereto, 1981) is an artist and curator. He creates shows, performances and installations in urban and non-urban contexts. He has visited the 79th parallel north in the Svalbard archipelago and read Frankenstein by campfire; created the Little Fun Palace, a parasitic caravan that has travelled widely in Europe and North America; curated the Feminist Futures Festival for Centrale Fies, and founded the Nomadic School that moves between mountains, swamps and other rural areas, contaminating art with natural and social sciences.

He develops his artistic research with the productive and organisational collaboration of Office for a Human Theatre [OHT], the research studio he founded in 2008. Together, they explore private and public spaces, shaking the centre and margins of theatre and redefining the map of our positions in shared spaces.