Conceived by Sumac Space and funded by BKJ, this international professional exchange is part of Sumac’s mediation practice. It brings together multidisciplinary artists, educators, and cultural workers from Italy and Germany for a collaborative lab, while remaining open to participants from all disciplines who are interested in collaborative exchange.

It is a seven-day program from 22–28 July 2026 at Galerie AC. (Donaustraße 84, Neukölln, Berlin). It is structured as two days of closed discussions, four days of collaborative work, and one day for a public presentation.

The objective is to nurture a collaborative exchange across photography and performative practices, bringing together Laboratorio Silenzio’s research into silence, gesture, and landscape-based performance with Chiara Bettazzi’s exploration of photography and a poetics of the everyday object. The central theme is the relationship between imagination and dreaming. It starts from the idea that imagination is more than fantasy. It reorganizes time through material, speculation, and possibility. Imagination lets us revisit day-to-day material memory and project ourselves toward what does not yet come or has already passed. It allows us to question present realities and construct alternative ways of being, thinking, and living, even if only temporarily. We will document methods, challenges, and key developments throughout the program.

Participants from Italy:

Laboratorio Silenzio: Serena Crocco, theater director and performer; Laura Fabbiani, performer; Chiara Grandini, performer, psychiatric rehabilitation; Elenora Rettori, documentary photographer and portraitist; Diego Dioguardi, sound designer

Laboratorio Silenzio is a social promotion association founded in Milan in 2016 that includes both hearing and hard-of-hearing people. It’s a container of inclusive artistic projects. Laboratorio Silenzio creates laboratories and performances in landscape, with particular interest in relational art, non-verbal communication, silence, walking as a practice for crossing landscape, body, gestures, and their possible contamination with urban and natural spaces. The inspiration for this project comes from the 

concept expressed by John Cage in his artwork called 4 '33’’: absolute silence does not exist because it’s filled up with something else. In our case, silence is filled by bodies that inhabit it. Laboratorio Silenzio has been collaborating since 2017 with landscape architect Elisabetta Bianchessi (T12 Lab and Verdi Acque) on projects that aim to reinhabit places through landscape and public space design, relational design, and theatrical performance.

Chiara Bettazzi was born in Prato in 1977. An artist and founder of the ex-industrial space on Via Genova, she pursues artistic research that explores two dimensions: on the one hand, places and spaces; on the other, a poetics of the everyday object, characterized by a dialogue between accumulation and discard. Her photographs and installations reflect on the idea of transformation and develop in close contact with the industrial and urban landscape. In her works, through a hybridization of object, industry, and nature, a spontaneous and dynamic relationship is created; many works have a site-specific character, generating a deep dialogue with the spaces and the natural light that permeates them. Using various media, she focuses on recording images that encourage access to and evoke a personal memory that becomes collective, with the intention not merely of observing nature but of giving form to its essence.

In 2015, she founded an observatory for the recovery of industrial archaeology in the Prato area, called Tuscan Art Industry, collaborating with architectural historians, environmental biologists, artists, curators, and other professional figures. Her works are held in public and private collections, including the Centro per l'arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, Casa Masaccio - Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea, the Collezione Farnesina, Museo di Santa Maria della Scala, Castello di Ama, and Villa Rospigliosi.