Biography

Working both as an architect and a scenographer, Andrea is a trans-disciplinary practitioner and academic. His activities are all strongly informed by expertise in architecture, scenography and urban design in Italy and U.K. Lecturer for Design for Stage and Screen at Nottingham Trent University, he has a particular interest in socially engaged spatial practice in heritage contexts, in the intersection between art, architecture and performance, and he is actively involved in these areas through the concept of Scenarchitecture, promoting a change in thinking and practice around theatre and performing arts. His creative work is centred on public space and the built environment for the design, curation and direction of sited performances, live events, installations, exhibits. His research interests and professional activity in Scenography and Performance include Cross Reality (VR, AR, MR), and digital scenography. He is co-founder of Archabout, a research collective in the field of architecture, urbanism and spatial practices.

Souls is a sited Heritage Design project and performance at Nottingham Castle as a collaboration between Theatre Design course of Nottingham Trent University and Midland 4 Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award. The aim was to unearth forgotten, denied or unexpressed stories linked to the representation of gender and LGBTQI+ in Castle histories. The performance embraced the opportunity to foster community engagement, gender equality and diversity, recruiting performers from the LGBTQ+ local community and including a person on wheelchair. Designers researched and selected five different historical characters embedding gender and LGBTQI+ histories in the historical interpretation of the Nottingham Castle, and designed CosProp artefacts to deliver an indoor immersive performance at the Nottingham Castle. Positive feedback received with a post-show survey evidenced not just the quality of the scripts and designs, but how the performance was able to engage the audience with the delicate theme of homosexuality, gender representation and disability.

A site-specific performance in the Rampa Prenestina (Rome) as a collaboration between L@birinti (Con)temporanei, the Course of Scenography of Univerisity of Rome La Sapienza and ESAYA – Escuela Superior de Arte y Arquitectura, Universidad Europea de Madrid, and association Archabout, inspired to the opera ‘L’Orfeo’ by Claudio Monteverdi. The Rampa Prenestina is a seven-storey high-rise cylindrical building, crossed by a drive-over helicopter ramp, a reinforced concrete tower originally intended to house the Cinecittà sets, subsequently occupied by the homeless of the capital, currently the seat of voluntary artistic and charity associations. Its circular and spiral-shaped architectural character, which recalls examples such as the Tower of Babel, Dante’s circles, the Well of St. Patrick, and its metropolitan graffiti on the internal walls, were precious inspirational clues for the design of an powerful immersive performance of “Theater of Places”.