Marisa Garreffa is a writer and performance artist from Australia, currently based in Florence. Her work explores the intersection between live performance practice, trauma recovery, and telling our stories as an act of recovery, resistance, and power.
Marisa works with a circular creative process where words are generated in real time through her live performance art, spoken word, and body-based trainings. These texts are then transcribed and refined through editing and research into multiple outcomes from the poetic to the theoretical.
In performance, she draws on traditions of oral storytelling, woven with memory, poetry, and contemporary mythologies of her-self, to give voice to complex interactions between gender violence, mental illness, mental health, and generational inheritance of grief. Breaking silence. Breaking shame. Exploring ways to speak the unspeakable, even when the story exists in non-verbal or incoherent forms, a common effect of trauma.
The texts are then published through diverse mediums, combined with photo or video records of live performance art works, and then their key themes or unresolved fragments are taken again into the performance arena to unfold further. Through this circular process, Marisa undertakes an ongoing interrogation and research into her own work and impulses.
She interrogates the way her own body performs its cultural and gendered narratives, challenging herself to examine, disrupt, and work consciously with the unconscious patterns she identifies in her own writing and performance actions. This deepens her research into the body, where she explores lost memories (such as her own experience of being drug raped, or the memory blanks created by trauma in childhood), as well as memories and stories held within, paying carful attention to the way that stories change and morph when channeled through the immediacy of embodied live art practices.
Marisa is the program director of SOTTO al British for the British Institute of Florence, an associate tutor for the Venice International Performance Art Week, and a speaker and advocate for mental health and gender studies across multiple institutions.
Her most recent performance was a seven day ritual live streamed from the British Institute, where she hand stitched together stories in multiple languages collected from across Florence and Tuscany, in a ritual to explore the careful and delicate work of reconnecting communities fractured by crisis.
RECENT WORKS AND POSITIONS
Marisa most recently presented works for: the British Institute of Florence in 2021, the internationally screened film Mirror in the Mirror for the Anam Cara Collective, for the 2020 Venice International Arts Week, at NYU Florence for a special exhibition and talk on Gender Based Violence, for the Collective Signatures festival in Formentera, at the 18th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh, at Green Wave Art and Hong Kong Art School for CCCD and Ubuntu Theatre in Hong Kong, as well as at Palazzo Mora for three editions of Venice International Performance Art Week, and Dancehaus in Milan for the Colpo al Corpo Performance Art Festival.
Marisa is the program director for SOTTO al British, a new cultural program designed to activate contemporary artistic life in the centre of Florence, hosted by the British Institute in their Sala Lungarno, launching in early 2022.
She presents talks and workshops for colleges and universities, educating young people about skills and resources available for supporting mental health – especially within a foreign cultural context. Her framework for a mental health program for international students was published in the International Studies Institute Journal, Beyond, Issue Two. She was one of the key speakers for the Roundtable Presentations in Florence on Violence Against Women. Marisa also presents talks on gender, gender-based violence, and identity for both academic and creative contexts. She recently gave the talk, Gender is a Wounded Body, for Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and will be speaking on The Heroine’s Journey: Gender in Story Construction for The Art of Writing masterclasses in Florence, Italy.
Her creative workshops combine trauma-sensitive bodywork with artistic expression, and include Unlocking Stories from the Body, and Performance as Truth. She fosters community spaces through the ongoing development of creative events, especially in her role as founder of the Placehold Open Mic Night in Florence.
She is the co-author of theatre production The Medici Dynasty Show, which ran for four years of extended seasons with more than 600 shows presented in Florence, Italy.
Find her writing at Medium and Garreffa Creative.
Recent Performance Works:
2021: “To Remember, To Listen”, a seven day durational performance at The British Institute, Florence
2021: “Torn”, a collaborative performance with artist Joshua Cosimo at Chiassa Perduto Gallery, Florence
2021: “Nothingness”, a spoken word performance for Galleria Duemila, Phillipines, in response to the artwork of Michael Vincent Manalo
2020: “Rituals of Healing: Closure”, at the Seminare Temporary Art Gallery, Panzano in Chianti
2020: Feature Film – “Mirror in the Mirror”, with the Anam Cara Collective, Performance-Based film, Produced by VestAndPage
2020: “Wild Dog”, a solo performance for the Anam Cara Collective, as part of Venice International Performance Art Week
2020: “Changing Democracy”, a performance and psychomagic ritual performed with Giorgi de Santi for the Venice International Performance Art Week.
2019: “Wild Dog”, Collaboration with photographer Dario Mannucci
2019: “Traces”, Live Ritual Performance for Break The Silence Art Exhibition, NYU Florence, Curated by Tiana Ly Urey and Cristina Teresa Kovalik
2019: “The Myth of Arcipelago”, Writer and Performer for Arcipelago, Collective Signatures 48 hour Performance Art Festival, Formentera, Spain
2019: “Rituals of Healing: Body”, for the Colpo al Corpo Festival, curated by Nicola Mette, Dancehaus Piu, Milano
2019: “This Is A Chicken Coop” by Choreographer Ergao, for the Fabbrica Europa Festival, Florence
2018: Anam Cara – Dwelling Body (with “Rituals of Healing: Roots”), for Venice International Performance Art Week, Venice, Italy
2018: “Ritual for Lost Land” and “What is my Language”, for Green Wave Art Space, Hong Kong
2018: Rituals of Healing: Traces, for the 18th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh
2018: Collective Work – “Perception of the Self”, ART WEEK Forte Marghera, Italy
2018: “Rituals of Healing: Traces”, collaboration with photographer Sarah Hickson, Au Brana Artist Residency, France
2018: Video Work Collaboration – “Act of Unplucking” with Fenia Kotsopoulou, Lincoln UK