Enrica Camporesi (°1985) builds her hybrid artistic practice as a crossroads of performing arts, audience dramaturgy and socio-pedagogical work.
Imagination, dialogue and encounter are central themes in her work, as well as misunderstandings and migration, nostalgia and translations. She connects individual life stories with macroscopic history, both in her artistic practice and in her sociocultural work and as a human being.
Her framework of thought moves between different contexts and languages (Italian, English, French, Dutch and Arabic). She regards languages and grammars as metaphors and fields of research, and enjoys playing with what language means - how we intend things with our words, how we act through language, and how misunderstandings arise in communication. In her workshop series The Weight of Words, for example, she searches for the mass and weight of words in our bodies.
"In her work, Enrica questions the foundations of our thinking about language: through a sensory approach to the word, she reveals other layers of how we experience language. For children who acquire a language while growing up or people who encounter a new language through migration, Enrica's research makes visible how differently we can experience language. In a multilingual society like that of a city like Antwerp, this research is essential." - Koen Haagdorens, dramaturg hetpaleis-
Enrica creates performances, theatre productions, storytelling, texts and translations, pedagogical workshops and participatory trajectories in search of liveable metaphors for fragmented communities and individuals.
Besides writing, she employs mindmaps and collective drawings as dramaturgical tools to visualize and facilitate processes and rehearsals, to capture the energy of situations that reach beyond the verbal.
Through her engagement with the feminist collective Tiny Demolitions, the artistic research house wpZimmer and the social kitchen of De Kompaan, she contributes to the development of informal peer-learning communities.
She holds a Master in Theatre (2023, Theatre Academy, Maastricht) and a master's degree in Arabic language, history and literature (2011, Cà Foscari University, Venice).
Work
Oef! (2024-25) is a theatre performance (blackbox, 4+) about how two people and a mystery meet each other, understand, lose and rediscover each other.
Oef! The arousal of meaning (2024 - in progress) is a collective artist book and paper object that considers artistic research as storytelling (production: ZUYD University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht). Based on the lecture/performance Oertaal: epiphanies (2023).
In Oertaal: exercises (2020-22) she spread a mythical story about language, motherhood and knowledge transfer as performance, article, lecture and workshop. For this she received a development grant from the Flemish Community.
In Performing the self - the interview (2017-20), a theatre performance and installation together with visual artist Elena Mazzi, she gave form to the impossible encounter between a protection officer and an asylum seeker before the arrival of the interpreter (script published in 2018 and 2023 by Thalie Art Foundation, Brussels).
As audience dramaturg and process visualizer she works for theatre maker Ahilan Ratnamohan in The Institute of Anarchic and Artistic Language Learning (2024) and Pidgin Zwolle (2022), Donja Hota (2024, directed by Enkidu Khaled), Palm: installative lecture performance by Lennert De Vroey and Elisa Palm (2025).
Besides her own artistic work, she engages as guest lecturer and workshop facilitator at art schools, organizations and cultural institutions, such as the Toneelacademie Maastricht, Conservatory Antwerp, het MAS, Faculty of Architecture/University of Antwerp and Hoge School Thomas More, De Veerman, Madame Fortuna, kunstZ, Mestizo Arts Platform, Man Over Boord.
Enrica wrote the dialogues for visual artist Elena Mazzi's audio installation Silver Rights (2020) and the short film Muse (2019 - Mascarilla: Codes of domestic violence). She is the author of the reviews/essays In altre parole word ik ook iemand anders and Geweldige fouten: enkele gedachten over normnegotiëren, taalmaken en elkaar begrijpen for Forum +, journal for research in the arts (2022, Amsterdam University Press, University of Antwerp).
She was co-founder of participatory theatre projects and street performances in Forlì, including I barbari: esperimenti di teatro intuitivo (2015).
She was media coordinator and PR manager for DCAF, Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (2011-13) and for the Italian Institute of Culture (2013) in post-revolutionary Cairo. About this she wrote as freelance correspondent for Africa e Mediterraneo and Istituto Paralleli.
Author of "Latent civil war. Historiography and national belonging in post civil war Lebanon" in Uni-formed memories. Peoples, states, nations in Mediterranean and Middle East (Milano, 2010).