Amateur Smugglers

A new border, a divided city, a new beginning. Two countries, two systems, two narratives, dividing, but also igniting a shared, common desire for the freedom of space and movement. Destination: borderless. Departing from personal memories and historical accounts of everyday acts of resistance by smuggling everyday goods across a city divided by border and ideology, “Amateur Smugglers – aSMUG” smuggles across the confines of the fourth wall a moving project of belonging to and longing for community, a shared, common humanity. The borderland has a distinct identity built on shared, common memories despite historical and political divisions – rather than a unifying grand narrative it needs a universal memory album. 

Project ASMUG – “Amateur Smugglers” in dance performance, community workshop and virtual reality (VR). The project explores – affirms – the humanity of memory, building a common space of experience through a dance performance, a community workshop about the freedom of space and movement, based on the methodology of the dance performance, and a memory walk through the experience of the borderland in virtual reality with a 360-degree motion capture and camera gaze – as an installation with digital goggles across cultural, heritage and tourist sites as well as a mobile application for personalized use, intersecting and intertwining audiences, disciplines, communities and industries. 

16 September 1947. The day that marks a new beginning. The day a new border line, the line crossing the territory of Gorizia, or Gorica, dividing Italy and Yugoslavia, is concretely marked on the ground. Wooden posts, long lines of white chalk, barbed wire. Archival images disclose two diverging points of view – two countries, two systems, two narratives of propaganda, dividing, confounding, but also igniting a desire. To cross that painful white line, new spaces are invented – secret places where personal belongings are hidden as they are transported illegally across the border. They are items relating to small pleasures. Those secret places are new spaces of belonging and longing – one that risks all for a fleeting moment of freedom. 

Destination: The stuff that dreams are made of. Destination: Belonging to community, a shared humanity. Longing for community, a common humanity. Borderless. Departing from personal memories and historical accounts of everyday acts of courage and ingenuity, small resistances in small pleasures by smuggling everyday goods, such as cigarettes, magazines, or jeans – putting the body on the line – across a city divided by a historical border – and political system, Amateur Smugglers (2024) smuggles across the confines of “the fourth wall” a moving performance of belonging to and longing for community, a shared, common humanity. Desire will set you free, or so populations and generations imagined. Desire for #denim, for instance. The stuff that dreams are made of. A case has been made for the role of #denim in bringing down borders – and systems. Borderless. This is the choice for freedom, not the freedom of choice, in going beyond, transcending or surpassing borders, migrating, fleeing, smuggling. 

Imbued with a genuine, raw, disarming wit – a Silvia Gribaudi & Andrea Rampazzo signature and staple – the choreography is a negotiation and mediation between personal boundary, stage convention and collective desire, through which a common and communal body is moving and is moved. No nostalgia, humour in humanity, and humanity in humour.