PLAY
A character is rarely introduced all at once.
Sometimes we meet them through a voice, an object, a gesture, a shadow, a photograph—or a small unexplained trace.
PLAY is an immersive storytelling workshop about discovering a character through the clues they leave behind.
Working individually and together, participants collect objects, images, sounds, words, memories, and visual fragments. We follow these traces, remix them, and allow unexpected connections to appear.
Through storytelling, cut-up, assemblage, visual metaphor, sound, movement, and collaborative world-building, a character gradually takes shape.
Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they carry with them? What happened before we met them?
There is no single answer.
We play until the story begins to reveal itself.
PLAY is an immersive storytelling workshop about discovering a character through the clues they leave behind.
Working individually and together, participants collect objects, images, sounds, words, memories, and visual fragments. We follow these traces, remix them, and allow unexpected connections to appear.
Through storytelling, cut-up, assemblage, visual metaphor, sound, movement, and collaborative world-building, a character gradually takes shape.
Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they carry with them? What happened before we met them?
There is no single answer.
We play until the story begins to reveal itself.
FROM CLUES TO A LIVING WORLD
The workshop does not end with a finished character.
The character becomes a doorway into a larger world.
As participants bring their objects and clues together, we look for the hidden relationships between them: recurring symbols, strange coincidences, contrasts, memories, textures, sounds, places, and stories.
We collect, rearrange, cut, assemble, draw, record, photograph, imagine.
A mood becomes a landscape.
An object becomes a clue.v
A clue becomes an event.
An image becomes a place.
A character begins to move through it.
Together, we construct the first fragments of a collective story-world—a physical and visual landscape that can grow beyond the workshop.
The final form is deliberately open: it might become a collaborative installation, a sculptural environment, an animated world, a map, a performance, a film, a collection of story objects—or something we haven’t imagined yet.
The workshop is the beginning.
The artwork is what emerges from the journey.
a whale tale | collective artwork
Exiled
When I opened my eyes I felt disoriented, around something like bubbles swirled furiously before my eyes.
Was I alive? Or was I dead? In that moment of sheer panic actually, these questions echoed in the ether of an oblivion that, at least in appearance, it was all in my head. I could hear the sounds, similar to those that produce a stomach-churning.
I felt the soft touch of water on the skin, or at least what I thought was water. I could see the blue spectral ocean under me and I tasted the salt of a life that no longer belonged to me.
Read the Complete Story
Workshop Photography
Mixed Media Installation I
Carton Board, White Acrylic Painting and Spray Can, Collage, Objects.
Serenella Rizzi, Emanuela Buratti, Vittoria Dalla Torre, Giuseppe Capucci, Manuel Turchi, Elisa Delle Donne, Ylenia Cipriano, Marlene Barcio.
Mixed Media Installation II
Drawing, Colored Pencil, Acrylic Painting, Collage
Angelica Zilli, Nicole Ballini, Annalisa Gorreri, Argenide Conti, Ludovica Carallo, Diego Roncarati, Mattia Tagliazucchi.
Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature—a face, a figure, a flower—and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others.
They are the signal within the noise – Frank Rose
They are the signal within the noise – Frank Rose