UNIDEE Residency Modules: LANGUAGES, PLEASE MODULE VII: Spell of color 15 - 19 June 2026 MODULE VII: Spell of color The Residency hosted 10 international artists from 10 countries. During the Residency themed around Languages, Ecology and Activism, the participants explored the post-industrial landscape and heritage of the city of Biella, that was central to textile manufacturing in the North of Italy. Taking walking trips to the local river that was used in the manufacturing processes, the artists developed ideas around the river ecologies, industrial pollution, accessibility and labour. Following Cromoactivismo approach and as part of co-creative process, an ethic and poetic manifesto was written as a series of word-centered artworks that the artists painted collectively in the UNIDEE Studios. The artworks were then mounted on wooden posts and carried in a performance-like ‘happening’, journeying from Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, along the river banks, through the busy Biella roundabout, and into the city historic centre, where the artworks were scattered. Resident Artists: Daniela Di Lullo (IT) Elia Kalogianni (NL/GR) Riccardo Rizzetto (IT/UK) Tommaso Giacomin (IT)Simona Rukuižaitė (LT) Maia Gattás Vargas (AR) Wera Grzes (PL/CH) Francesca Casale (IT) Ricardo Miranda (USA) Katya Mora Crisostomo (MX/UK) Varvara Keidan Shavrova (UK) Overview This was the seventh module of the Languages, Please residency project, curated by UNIDEE visiting curators Nina Fiocco and Gaia Martino. Languages, Please is conceived as an organic project that unfolds across distinct residency modules and an accompanying public programme over the course of a biennium. The UNIDEE modules are programme-based week-long residency formats. Participating residents are offered the opportunity to expand on their ongoing research and practice exploring languages as geopolitical spaces of dispute, narratives, and encounters, within a group of peers and invited guests. The modules are interlinked, and each contributes to shaping the discourse developed by the project as a whole. Module VII (Summer 2026) was curated by UNIDEE Visiting Curators with invited mentor Marina De Caro, member ofCromoactivismo. Cromoactivismo is a collective of poetic and transversal activism that intervenes in public space, political demonstrations, and cultural and educational spaces and institutions. We name colors through a poetics that accounts for situated experience, historical memory, and the political conjuncture, creating textual-visual devices. The collective production of posters, hand-painted cardboard placards, and other devices makes historical demands, social actions, and community calls visible, transforming the meeting space into a laboratory focused on the political dimension of color and the singular and collective experiences of the participants. Since 2016, the collective has worked together with other collectives, groups, and schools in direct-action “cromoactivations” that promote gatherings of poetry, painting, and poster-making to intervene in different contexts. Until 2024, Cromoactivismo was made up of Marina De Caro, Mariela Scafati, Vic Musotto, Daiana Rose, and Guille Mongan. Currently, the collective includes Marina De Caro, Vic Musotto, and Guille Mongan, as well as all the institutions and collectives that have autonomously joined the initiative. Module Statement Can color join the poetics of the word and political action? How can political proposals enter into dialogue with the experiences and sensitivities that color provokes in our bodies? Color, as a metaphor for a perceptible and plural form of knowledge—of sensitive and restless gestures—has the capacity to deconstruct social and hegemonic norms. Colors, as sensory expressions, question us and cease to be innocent when they touch the surface of all bodies and carry us to the deepest layers of the collective soul. It is in the body where color vibrates, when we share each affective tone of the world within a context that calls for sensitivities, ideas, and projects that involve us all. Color and its interpretation are linked to a historical context and situated within a personal and shared experience. For Cromoactivismo, color is a tool that challenges the sensitive capacity of our bodies and becomes collective by identifying and sharing forms of knowledge that put dominant narratives under tension. Our singular and social body explores the emotional, the pulsional, the cathartic, the sensitive, the subtle, the sonic, the olfactory, and movement, in order to project itself into multiple ideas and projects—momentarily suspending the hegemony of the visual and rational analysis in the construction of our = symbolic and material system. Awareness of our movements and perceptions when passing through a singular, common, social, and political experience will be exercised so that we can revisit our ways of thinking, distance ourselves from hegemonic sensitivities and agendas, reformulate our desires, and project other events within a micropolitical space. The workshop will allow us to revisit dominant concepts and ideas in order to question them. Initially, we will work with blindfolded bodily experience exercises, focusing on the singular. From these experiences and the new questions that arise from them, participants will share collectively, building a common working protocol. Cromoactivismo proposes to reclaimcolor as a metaphor and symbolic field for these shared and singular experiences. The final proposal will be to name colors through a poetic premise and to create a new color chart that gives rise to other possible future narratives. ABOUT CITTADELLARTE Cittadellarte inspires and produces a responsible transformation of society through art, ideas, and creative projects. Cittadellarte is a cultural factory, a hub, an extended community of thinkers, administrators, and innovators from all fields: a collective artistic project. The Pistoletto Cittadellarte Foundation is a new model of artistic and cultural institution that involves art in different sectors of society as an enzyme of transformation based on the freedom/responsibility duality. As such, it differs from academies and museums by developing, alongside its well-established exhibition and educational functions, an art directly engaged in the responsible transformation of society. Cittadellarte was founded based on the Manifesto Progetto Arte by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Published in 1994, this manifesto proposes a new role for the artist: to place art in direct interaction with all areas of human activity that form society. As its extension, Cittadellarte acts as a school-laboratory dedicated to the study, experimentation, and development of Demopraxia and other practices that translate the symbol of the Third Paradise into reality, starting from the individual to the largest organizations such as the United Nations. The name Cittadellarte refers to the concept of civitas, as the very purpose of this organization is to produce civilization through art, working in collaboration and network with thousands of public and private entities that share this vision, including the Rebirth/Terzo Paradiso Ambassadors. Cittadellarte is located within the premises of a former factory, the ex Lanificio Trombetta, a complex of industrial archaeology in the historic textile center of Biella. Through its activities, the Pistoletto Foundation represents an innovative model for the management and use of the architectural complex, which has strongly influenced the urban restructuring of the city of Biella since the 1990s, contributing to the creation of an urban hub dedicated to culture and multidisciplinary activities, serving a glocal audience.