In Marilisa Cosello’s research, the body is a linguistic device that acts in space to analyze and deconstruct physical or behavioral standards. Through performances and installations that interweave gesture, time and representation, the artist investigates the public and political dimension of sporting physical expression, interrogating its foundational codes from within. Her work moves in a frontier territory between art and popular culture, between the idealized body and the real one, between discipline and vulnerability. In each project, the corporeal form becomes a sign, a writing that translates interior tensions and collective dynamics, revealing the symbolic structures underlying our ideas of strength, beauty, competition and belonging.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym”, performance nell’ambito di “The Then About As Until”, ArtVerona XX edizione, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, ph. Alberto Sinigaglia, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
On the occasion of the reopening of Palazzo Forti in Verona, the artist presented Utopia Gym, a new chapter in her performative reflection on corporeality understood as visual code and social language. The athletes, in this case two very young fencers and four rugby players, arranged in the museum space like living sculptures, compose and decompose group configurations drawn from the sporti gestures: lunges, parries, thrusts, tackles, scrums, defensive lines or passing actions are extracted from their competitive context to become visual structure, architecture of bodies in tension. In this process of translation from the sports field to the art space, athletic action loses its immediate function to become choreographic lexicon, where physical power condenses into form and posture becomes a sign. The artist extracts the grammar from sporting codes, suspends it in time and reveals its symbolic nature. Each gesture becomes charged with semantic density: it is no longer just physical performance, but a silent reflection on discipline, on teamwork, on the relationship between individual body and collective body. The result is a score of stillness and movement that reflects on the construction of heroism and the rituality of fatigue, while the absence of a competitive purpose dissolves the action into pure presence.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym”, performance nell’ambito di “The Then About As Until”, ArtVerona XX edizione, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, ph. Alberto Sinigaglia, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
The insertion of these athletic figures in the noble context of the grotesque-decorated rooms of Palazzo Forti emphasizes the visual and conceptual short circuit inherent in this operation. The players’ poses, suspended between effort and balance, evoke the plastic tradition of classical sculpture, recalling the ideal bodies of Canova or the casts of ancient athletes, but reverse their aestheticizing logic. Here strength is no longer sublimated into harmony, but shown in its physical concreteness, in the tension of muscles and the concentration of faces. It is a collective, political body, speaking of shared identity and relationship, rather than heroic individuality. The utopia evoked by the title, therefore, is not so much that of a perfect body, but the hypothesis of a community that builds itself through cooperation, listening and resistance. Gym is the space of sweat, repetition and training: a place where the body is shaped, but also where the distance between ideal and real is measured, somewhat like what happens in artistic creation, where form is born from friction, from time, from the intensity of being. In Utopia Gym, beauty does not reside in the finalization of the gesture, but in its duration, in the tenacity of a precarious balance that becomes a shared image.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym”, performance nell’ambito di “The Then About As Until”, ArtVerona XX edizione, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, ph. Alberto Sinigaglia, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
Emanuela Zanon: At what moment in your creative journey and following what intuitions did you decide to focus your performances on the sporting body?
Marilisa Cosello: The question of when is perhaps less relevant than the how and the why. Around 2020, with Try, I began to recognize in sport not so much a subject as an epistemological condition – a way of knowing through the body that precedes language. Sport is already a form of abstraction: it codifies movement into rules, transforms gesture into sign. I was interested in this liminal zone where the body simultaneously becomes subject and object of its own representation, where physicality becomes discourse without ever ceasing to be flesh.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym,” performance as part of “The Then About As Until,” ArtVerona 20th edition, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, photo by Alberto Sinigaglia, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
In what way does your performative practice dialogue with photography and with more traditional visual arts? What meaning does the passage from the sports field to the museum space hold for you?
There is an unresolved – and productive – tension between the performative event and its photographic documentation. It’s not a matter of translation, but of necessary betrayal: photography freezes what is by nature duration, yet in this freezing reveals something that the eye in real time doesn’t grasp. The museum, moreover, is not simply an alternative container to the sports field; it is a device that ontologically transforms what it contains. When I bring sweat into museum halls, I’m not elevating the low but interrogating the categories of high and low, asking myself: who decides what deserves contemplation?
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym,” performance as part of “The Then About As Until,” ArtVerona 20th edition, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, photo by EnneviPhoto, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
In Utopia Gym, how did you construct the score of the performers’ movements and the relationship between their bodies and the static works of other artists installed at Palazzo Forti? What difference was there in presenting this performance in this environment so strongly characterized compared to a more neutral space?
The score – if we can call it that – emerges from a process of subtraction rather than composition. I asked the athletes to isolate gestural fragments, to inhabit them to exhaustion. The baroque grotesques of the palace were not background but interlocutor: there is a profound resonance between the exuberant ornamentation and the muscular excess of the athlete, both push form toward its expressive limit. In a white cube space, the work would have been tautological – bodies talking about bodies. At Palazzo Forti it becomes palimpsest: stratifications of power, of representation, of exclusion that overlap without ever resolving.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym,” performance as part of “The Then About As Until,” ArtVerona 20th edition, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, photo by EnneviPhoto, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
Rugby and fencing propose very different bodily and behavioral models: the former values muscle mass and collective power, while fencing privileges agility, precision and the individuality of the gesture. What reflections did this obvious difference between the two body standards you staged bring forth in you?
I see this apparent polarity as part of a continuum of disciplinary constructions. Both the rugby player and the fencer are products of power systems that shape bodies making them simultaneously docile and productive. The difference perhaps lies in the type of subjectivity they produce: rugby dissolves the I into a muscular we, fencing sharpens it into a point. But both participate in the same economy of performance. In Utopia Gym I don’t oppose them but make them coexist, creating what we could call a corporeal dissensus – bodies that don’t add up into harmony but persist in their irreducible difference.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym,” performance as part of “The Then About As Until,” ArtVerona 20th edition, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, photo by EnneviPhoto, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
The utopia of the title seems to refer to a tension between ideal and real, between discipline and freedom. How is this vision concretely reflected in the configurations that bodies assume in space? Are there moments when the community dissolves or enters into conflict?
The utopia here is not programmatic but critical – I don’t propose a model but suspend existing ones, interrogating their assumptions. Bodies aggregate following provisional logics, create ephemeral communities that dissolve before crystallizing into form. There is always a crucial moment where the construction wavers, where the real bursts through fatigue or trembling. This precariousness is not a limit but the condition of the political: every community is an unstable balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces.
Marilisa Cosello, “Utopia Gym,” performance as part of “The Then About As Until,” ArtVerona 20th edition, Palazzo Forti, Verona, 2025. Performer: Verona Rugby & Bentegodi Scherma, photo by EnneviPhoto, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
Watching the performance, monumentality and fragility find a provisional balance in the coexistence of the aestheticizing pose and the visibility of the physical fatigue necessary to maintain it. Which of these two components, which recall the Apollonian or Dionysian of classical culture, emerges as dominant?
The Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy is seductive but perhaps insufficient. What happens in Utopia Gym is rather a short circuit between scopic regime and haptic regime: the eye seeks classical form but the body returns weight, gravity, exhaustion. No dialectical synthesis is possible. Monumentality is not negated by fragility but inhabited by it, like a parasite that erodes from within. It is this erosion – more than one or the other polarity – that interests me: the moment when the ideal cracks and through that fissure we can glimpse something not yet codified.
Info:
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT