For its 2025 edition, Arte Fiera continues its tradition of blending contemporary art with live performance, renewing its collaboration with Fondazione Furla for a third consecutive year. This year, the esteemed artist Adelaide Cioni takes centre stage with her latest creation, Five Geometric Songs, a captivating performance that merges visual art, music, and movement.
Cioni, a Bologna-born artist with a background in drawing, sculpture, literature, and translation, presents a work that builds upon her long-standing fascination with geometric abstraction and colour. With Five Geometric Songs, she transforms the concept of patterns into an immersive, rhythmic experience where visual and auditory elements intertwine seamlessly.
Set against the backdrop of the Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau, a reconstruction of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s 1925 Paris Exposition pavilion, the performance is a dialogue between past and present, form and function, movement and stillness. Through five distinct geometric costumes—designed by Cioni herself—five dancers bring her patterns to life, their choreographed movements set to the original score of Dom Bouffard. The result is an intricate interplay of shape, colour, and sound, transforming the space into a dynamic, living canvas.
The Language of Patterns
Cioni’s artistic philosophy stems from the fundamental elements of drawing: line, point, square, triangle, and circle. By repeating and layering these elementary shapes, she taps into a universal visual vocabulary that has transcended cultures, eras, and disciplines. Patterns, deeply embedded in nature and human history, serve as a bridge between abstraction and perception. “Drawing a pattern is like singing a song,” Cioni explains, highlighting the intimate bond between visual repetition and musical rhythm. In Five Geometric Songs, she explores this connection by transforming geometric forms into choreography, allowing movement to amplify the expressive power of pattern. Here, fabric plays a pivotal role—not merely as a medium, but as a conduit that connects body to space, tradition to innovation, and static imagery to fluid experience.
The Performance Experience
Each performance unfolds as a 45-minute journey where the dancers, clad in Cioni’s geometric costumes, become vessels for the artist’s vision. As they move, the costumes shift, distorting and reconfiguring the patterns, creating an ever-evolving visual spectacle. Bouffard’s music, an integral component of the performance, enhances this synesthetic experience, drawing attention to the shared archetypes of shape and sound. Beyond the stage, Cioni extends her exploration of geometry into the surrounding environment. The performance space is adorned with fabric installations and wooden cutouts echoing the abstract forms of the costumes. This layering of shape and material blurs the boundary between performance and installation, inviting spectators to engage with the work on multiple sensory levels.
The choice of the Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau as the performance venue adds an additional layer of meaning to Five Geometric Songs. The structure, originally conceived as a manifesto of modernist ideals, provides a compelling setting for Cioni’s exploration of form and repetition. By responding to the pavilion’s geometric purity, she creates a site-specific work that resonates with Le Corbusier’s vision of space as a living organism, where architecture, art, and human experience coalesce.
Adelaide Cioni’s artistic trajectory is as multifaceted as her work. Having studied drawing at UCLA and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, she also holds master’s degrees in modern history and literary translation. Before fully committing to visual art, she spent a decade translating American literature—a background that informs her nuanced understanding of language, rhythm, and structure. Her performances, including Touch Song (London, 2024) and Song for a Square, a Circle, a Triangle (London, 2023), showcase her ability to translate abstract concepts into immersive, sensorial experiences. Experience Five Geometric Songs For those attending Arte Fiera 2025, Five Geometric Songs promises to be a highlight of the fair’s live program. The performances will take place at the Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau on the following dates and times:
Thursday, 6 February: 4 PM, 5 PM, 6 PM Friday, 7 February: 11 AM, 12 PM Saturday, 8 February & Sunday, 9 February: 11 AM, 12 PM, 1 PM
Admission is free, with no reservation required. Attendees are welcome to enter at any point during the performance. Additionally, the space will remain open to the public until 4 PM on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, allowing visitors to explore the installations beyond the scheduled performances.
In Five Geometric Songs, Adelaide Cioni masterfully bridges the worlds of visual art, music, and movement, creating a sensory-rich experience that challenges conventional boundaries. Through the interplay of shape, colour, and rhythm, she invites audiences to reconsider the fundamental elements of perception, offering a performance that is both deeply intellectual and profoundly emotive.
As Arte Fiera continues to champion innovative artistic practices, Cioni’s work stands as a testament to the enduring power of abstraction—a language that, despite its simplicity, speaks directly to the core of human experience.
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Music: Dom Bouffard Performers: Jari Boldrini, Typhaine Delaup, Valentina Foschi, Giovanfrancesco Giannini, Daniela Malusardi Curated by: Bruna Roccasalva for Arte Fiera 2025 Promoted by: BolognaFiere in collaboration with Fondazione Furla
Creative Credits
- Written by
- Marvin Gloria
- Image courtesy
- Lara Facco P&C
- Photography
- Tim Smyth
- Photography
- Andrea Rossetti
- Creative Credit
- Lara Facco P&C; Fondazione Memmo, Gasworks, P420 and The Approach
- Creative Credit
- Adelaide Cioni / Lara Facco P&C
- Creative Credit
- Lara Facco P&C; Triennale Milano, P420 and The Approach
- Creative Credit
- Adelaide Cioni, P420 and The Approach
- Illustration
- Adelaide Cioni
