GABRIELE BOCCACINI

Since 1971 he has been carrying out intense research in the field of visual arts that continues to this day. Several interventions have been made in the field of contemporary visual arts with personal exhibitions and installations in cultural centers and museums in Italy and abroad. In the early 1970s, he made his first performances in public places, with visual art interventions and creating happenings that involve the public. Since 1975 he has been working professionally in the theater field: he participates in the constitution of the “Assemblea Teatro” cooperative. In 1976 he was invited to the Venice Biennale, where he intervened on the theme of “Visual Composition”, presenting some projects dedicated to collective creation. Research continues in the theatrical field, first as an actor, then also as an author and director, dealing in particular with the teaching of Jerzy Grotowski, attending numerous training workshops in Italy with the actors of the “Teatr Laboratorium” in Wroclaw and in Poland, as an active witness of the project “The theater of the springs” directed by Jerzy Grotowski. With Eugenio Barba he participates in the ISTA (school of theatrical anthropology, in the Volterra session) dedicated to the training of directors. From 1980 he assumed the artistic direction of the “Bagatto Theater Research Group”, currently called “Stalker Teatro”, which in 1986 became a cooperative. With this artistic ensemble, a historical group of the theater of innovation in Italy, he carries out an in-depth research on the potential of theatrical language, with laboratory and event production activities as part of the “Stalker – The Dreamers of Reality” project, together with guests and operators of the former psychiatric hospital of Collegno, where he coordinates the organization of the “Zona” Theater Experimentation and Teaching Center.
In thirty-five years of activity, the numerous productions of shows, performances, installations and events made with Stalker Teatro, where the experience in the visual arts is integrated with the theatrical language in a broad and articulated vision of artistic making, alternates the direction of about fifty festivals and reviews organized by Stalker Teatro, including “Differenti Sensazioni” 25 editions, the first international festival dedicated to contemporary arts in Piedmont, “E ‘(c) centrico” review held at the Officine Caos in Turin which since 2003 it has been dedicated to the new innovation companies of the Piedmont area, in comparison with foreign experience and theater of diversity and the International Festival of Art and Theater in the Environment “InPiazzo – PiazzOff”. Always with the Stalker Teatro Company for about ten years he collaborated with the well-known artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, carrying out numerous projects in Italy and abroad and starting activities at the industrial archeology site in Biella which will become “Cittadellarte”.
Several publications in which he participates by intervening on the specifics of the research conducted with the Stalker Teatro company, research that has been the subject of theses and studies several times through workshops and seminars at the universities of Turin, Milan, Bologna, Urbino, Vienna, Warsaw, Munich of Bavaria, Avignon.
He is the artistic director of the Officine CAOS for the Performing Arts and Contemporary Art in Turin.