Raffaela Naldi Rossano | Tentacular Bed

PERFORMANCE
Wednesday, September 24, 2025 | 7, 9, 11 PM
Doors open 6.30 PM
Free admission, until capacity is reached

FAMILIAR CONSTELLATION
Saturday, September 13, 2025 | 2 - 5 PM
Free admission, reservation available

ACCESS TO THE BEHIND THE SCENES
From Monday, September 15 to Thursday, September 18, 2025 | 5 - 7 PM
Free admission, until capacity is reached

 

What is the space between us?
The sea that separates and unites, that makes us dwell together – or apart.
To leave or to stay.

 

OGR Torino presents Tentacular Bed: on Moving, the making of Raffaela Naldi Rossano’s first screenplay conceived for her ongoing sculptural platform Tentacular Bed (2018–present).

The sculptures that make up the work function as transitional objects, transforming the Binario 1 hall of the former Officine Grandi Riparazioni, once train reparation workshops, into a relational field. They take the form of a wide collective bed: a modular, mobile, and reconfigurable platform that is at once a space of hospitality and a musical instrument. This collective bed, composed of modular fragments that allow the distance between bodies to be constantly renegotiated, becomes a proposition for a space that generates relationships and multiple narratives.

Tentacular Bed originates from the artist’s desire to create an in-between space, halfway home and shoreline, a “home in motion”. The project began in 2017, when the artist chose to transform her grandmother’s abandoned house – an uninhabitable ruin – into a platform for creation and experimentation. Here, the very notion of dwelling is redefined, opening new models of coexistence and communal life.

The ten irregularly shaped sculptures stem from an imaginative cartography that interlaces maps from different temporalities – digital and mythical – tracing both the waters of the Mediterranean and the primordial Tethys Ocean, in a continuous renegotiation of boundaries. In this remapping, spaces become layered and unfold as sites of possibility, where bodies resonate with one another depending on their positions, distances, and proximities.

The screenplay, written and directed for OGR Torino, invites a group of collaborators to take part in the collective enactment of an open, evolving narrative composition inspired by Mediterranean myths and oral traditions.

The exhibition space is not employed as a mere display site but as a shifting set, used as a therapeutic setting. Drawing on her background in psychology, the artist has adopted family constellation practices as a compositional method guiding the movements of both sculptures and bodies.

The narrative unfolds in three acts, exploring desire within relationships between self and other, across different temporalities: encounter, separation, and reunion. OGR Torino – once a site for reparation – becomes, symbolically, a site of reconstruction, hosting the dramaturgical process itself.

The artist has composed a new script: a poetic text that interweaves original verses with re-elaborated historical materials. Neapolitan villanelle, a musical genre originated in Naples, fragments of ancient sound compositions conceived as invocations to deities, historical epitaphs, and contemporary lines converge into contemporary verses and historical epitaphs, in an interweaving of languages and metrics that collapses linear temporalities, in a constant return and interpenetration of diverse sources. The voice reactivates distant echoes, overlaps them, and reverberates through space.

From this textual score, the artist has invited several composers to create music, to accompany the words. The compositions are specifically created for the sculptures, transforming the works into devices that accompany the voices: the instruments can be tuned in multiple keys, reflecting the relational nature of the work, which changes depending on who interacts with it.

The exhibition thus unfolds as a ritual – both collective and intimate – in the making. At its core, the love song acts as a connective tissue for the narrative, a structure through which to navigate oscillations between belonging and departure, estrangement and return, longing and belonging.

The space will open to the public for one night only, on September 24. During this time frame, the dramaturgical activations will take place on three occasions, at 7 PM, 9 PM, and 11 PM, but the public will be able to inhabit the installation throughout the entire opening of the space.
After this moment, the work will be ready to travel elsewhere, to find new physical configurations, new voices to activate it, and new forms, in a future video work by the artist.

As part of the residency program, on Saturday, September 13, from 2 PM to 5 PM, a family constellation open to the public by reservation will be held. In addition, during several days of the video’s making-of, there will be a time window open to the public, in which it will be possible to respond to the artist’s invitation to interact with the installation: from Monday, September 15, to Thursday, September 18, from 5 pm to 7 pm.

 

Written, directed and performed by: Raffaela Naldi Rossano
Composers: Luca de Rosa, Luciano Chessa, Sarah Ourahmane
Musicians: Vanja Contu, Eleonora Savio
Voices: Danilo Pastore, Francesca Idini
Choir: “Cantabile in Coro” della Fondazione Cantabile diretto da Giorgio Guiot
Acting Coach: Alberto Soncini
Family Constellations: Emanuela M. Vadda
Curator: Samuele Piazza
Costumes: Serapis