Who is one female secondary character that you recall seeing in a movie? Was she a secretary, a girlfriend, a teacher? Perhaps a mother, a daughter? Did she have any lines at all? And what did her voice sound like?

For this short residency at Scuola Piccola Zattere, Carolina questions how female secondary roles - often brief, marginal or almost invisible - shape and are shaped by the architecture of cinema and film production, reflecting on the ontology of the medium and how gender operates within the film genre.

Carolina Cappelli is an Italian performer, filmmaker and artistic gymnastic teacher based in Vienna. She studied film, audiovisual practices, experimental theatre and performing arts at Accademia di Belle Arti (Bologna), IUAV (Venice) and Mattatoio (Rome).
Her research involves the hybridisation between writing and performative and cinematic practices, generating works that question the context in which they’re proposed, on the edge between fiction and reality. Carolina has worked with artists such as Markus Öhrn, Francesca Grilli, Bruce Nauman, Roberto Fassone and Alex Franz Zehetbauer. She is the winner of Italian Council 2024 and of the Vienna prize for performing arts provided by the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Italian cultural Institute of Vienna. In 2025, she was part of the PARASOL program of Tanzquartier, Vienna.