Nicolas Ballario, listed among the 100 most influential figures in the art world by Il Giornale dell’Arte, guides the audience through the history and poetics of Maurizio Cattelan, one of the most renowned and controversial contemporary Italian artists on the international scene.

At the heart of the evening are three of Cattelan’s works — irreverent and provocative pieces that challenge art and society with sharp irony and striking visual power.

Choreographer Lara Guidetti, together with CCN/Aterballetto dancers Alessia Giacomelli and Kiran Gezels, gives body and movement to Cattelan’s visions, transforming the irony, paradox, and silence of his works into physical gesture.

The three choreographic pieces created for this evening stem from works that are vastly different from one another, compelling the dancers to inhabit ever-changing physical grammars: from physical theatre to abstract form, from extreme restraint to the poetic power of the mask. The challenge is not to create a stylistic continuum, but to generate radical metamorphoses that free the performers from the traces of the author and lead them into unforeseen territories.

On stage, images intertwine, oscillating between beauty and rawness: a Milan that resembles a factory farm of unconscious bodies, a child on the verge of becoming a monster, an ordinary man facing a gun. It is dance that recomposes these fragmented visions, restoring unity to what is dissonant — turning each artwork into a physical experience and each vision into a living presence.