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biography

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Fabricio Mattos is a classical guitarist, researcher, and founder of internationally acclaimed projects such as WGC-Worldwide Guitar Connections. His performative and academic work is focused on creating new ways of looking to artistic Performance in the 21st century, with special attention to the collaboration between creative professionals. Apart from regularly touring in five continents and taking part in exciting artistic projects, Mattos is also an energetic scholar, currently pursuing a PhD degree at the Royal Academy of Music researching the influence of spaces and layouts on the dynamics and terminology of Performance.

 

fabriciomattos.com/

 

 

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abstract

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Fabricio's paper will explore concepts relating to "emptiness" in the context of performance spaces:

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This talk aims to bind together history, aesthetics, and the future of Performance and its spaces in a thought-provoking way, exploring how different conceptual understandings of 'emptiness' could influence the way we conceive our performance spaces. I will introduce concepts such as Performalism, which explores the joining points between Architecture and Performance that inspired some architects to think about basic elements and concepts in Architecture that are often taken for granted. The talk continues with the ideas of figures such as Peter Brook, Kenya Hara, and John Cage, related to the conceptual application of ‘emptiness’ in their respective fields. Brook revolutionized the way of thinking about theatre particularly in the 1970s through both his work as a director and with the publication of The Empty Space; Kenya Hara is a Japanese designer whose philosophy and aesthetic principles are widely known to be applied to products from Muji and concept shops such as Japan House; and John Cage explored new ways of thinking about music particularly through his writings on the relationship between music and silence, and works such as 4’33’’. I will then follow with a brief showcase of aspects of my PhD research that explore the influence of spaces and layouts on the terminology of Performance. Finally, architects and performers will be invited to re-think the design of ‘empty’ Performance spaces, in which the primary concern would be to allow the realization of alternative performance layouts without any confrontation between performative conceptual ideas and the physical structure where they take place.