Gianmaria Borzillo

23/05 — 02/06/2026

Residenza breve

E la bella stanza è vuota is the performative and choreographic research by Gianmaria Borzillo, inspired by a passage from Franz Kafka's Letters to Milena, later taken up by the writer Edmund White, which describes an impossible relationship: people who are very close to one another yet incapable of truly meeting, trapped in a continuous mutual withdrawal. This image of emptiness and solitude becomes the driving force of the piece, where isolated bodies search for new forms of community, listening, and coexistence through music, memories, and shifting identities.

Central to the work is the inspiration drawn from Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee, a cult album released in 2024 outside the logic of the music market — a radical, anarchic, and anti-systemic gesture that the performance attempts to evoke: an ephemeral, almost clandestine event, destined to emerge and disappear. The album thus becomes dramaturgical material for questioning our relationship with the other, and the desire to hold onto those who vanish — not only others, but also the Other within oneself — while photography, modelled on the imagery of Nan Goldin, becomes a fragile trace of the presence of those people who once inhabited this now-empty room.

GIANMARIA BORZILLO (Sorrento, 1995) is an Italian dancer, performer, and choreographer working across dance, performance, and interdisciplinary artistic practices. His research develops at the intersection of physical writing, music, and visual dramaturgy, building a transdisciplinary approach that draws from literature and cinema and is shaped through encounters within collaborative processes. He trained as a dancer at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in Milan and pursued academic studies in Modern Literature, later continuing his education in Cinema and Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris.
As a performer, Borzillo has collaborated with internationally acclaimed artists, including Alessandro Sciarroni, with whom he performs works such as Save the Last Dance for Me, a project dedicated to the rediscovery of the traditional Bolognese dance polka chinata, presented since 2019 at major theatres and international festivals. He has also worked with artists such as Chiara Bersani and Antonio Tagliarini, taking part in collaborative processes that explore transmission, authorship, and the relationship between bodies.
Alongside his work as a performer, he develops his own choreographic research. His first piece, Under the Influence (2020), received a Special Mention in the Venice Biennale's open call for directors under 30, as well as recognition from the Premio Leo De Berardinis. His subsequent creation, Femenine (2024), inspired by the music of Julius Eastman, was supported by major institutions including CENTQUATRE-PARIS, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. His most recent performative research, E la bella stanza è vuota (or other hallucinations inspired by Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee), was selected for NID Platform 2025 – Open Studios section.
His artistic practice is marked by a deep attentiveness to music and cinema as compositional matrices, and by an interest in the body understood as a site of transformation, memory, and relational experience. Through both individual and collaborative works, Borzillo investigates the processes of translation between bodies, the construction of identity, and the potential of performance as a space of shared perception.