Collettivo Amigdala is a feminist and intersectional collective based in Modena, Italy, working at the intersection of performing arts and the public sphere. Through site-specific research, participatory practices, and performative interventions, the collective fosters community engagement and re-imagines spatial dynamics in both urban and rural contexts. Its methodology is rooted in feminist ethics of care, radical listening, and empowerment, amplifying voices and perspectives often pushed to the margins—particularly those of women, queer people, migrants, and racialized communities.
One of the flagship initiatives is Periferico Festival, an international platform for site-specific performance that has animated Modena since 2008. Rather than occupying conventional venues, the festival activates marginal or overlooked spaces—abandoned factories, working workshops, forests, rooftops—transforming them into stages for artistic experimentation and civic encounter. This nomadic format enables deep collaborations between guest artists and local inhabitants, interrogating the relationships among place, memory, and power.
Alongside curatorial activities, Collettivo Amigdala produces its own artistic works, centred on voice, choir, and participatory formats. Walking has become a recurring and evolving practice within these works—used as a tool for collective exploration, feminist mapping, and the reappropriation of urban and peripheral space. Through guided walks, soundwalks, and processions, the act of walking becomes a form of political presence and embodied research.
The collective also manages OvestLab, a former mechanical workshop turned neighbourhood cultural hub in Modena’s Villaggio Artigiano. OvestLab hosts residencies, co-creation laboratories, and research initiatives developed in partnership with artists, scholars, and community stakeholders.
Grounded in the conviction that art can serve as a catalyst for spatial justice, collective imagination, and transformative forms of inhabiting space, Collettivo Amigdala continues to devise new practices based on interdependence, care, and radical listening.
Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) is an artistic cooperation project, co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe, starting in January 2024 for four years. With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, backed up by an online counterpart in the format of a digital platform for walking arts.
WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers already practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, and having met at the significant previous walking arts events and encounters in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and during online activities at walk · listen · create.
We acknowledge the support of the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant program in the framework of the European project WALC (Walking Arts and Local Community).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.