The Hoxton Hotel in Rome recently hosted a compelling performance by visual artist Martina Rota, curated by the editorial platform Altremuse in partnership with Donnexstrada. This initiative, supported by PR and Brand Manager Silvia Curtilli, highlights the crucial work of Donnexstrada, a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing and combating gender-based violence while promoting individual autonomy and collective responsibility. Donnexstrada, co-led by creative director Bianca Hirata, has established approximately 900 ‘Punti Viola’ (Purple Points) across Italy, creating safe spaces and fostering wider networks of awareness and support. The Hoxton Hotel now joins this network.
Hirata shared, “Celebrating a Punto Viola in this manner for me is not just marking an achievement or reiterating a message, but rather an attempt to inhabit a space in a more complex and vibrant way, allowing us to imagine safety not just as something declared, but as something also built through lived experiences.” She further explained her desire to organize this performance with Altremuse as a shared experiment. “It’s a moment where, while still deeply loving the word and all we’ve built through talks and meetings over the years, I realized something needed to be experienced differently, less explained and more lived; as if it were necessary to move slightly outside of oneself to make space for what we don’t fully control yet,” Hirata elaborated.
Titled *Il sogno che mi assegno* (The Dream I Assign Myself), the event launched Martina Rota’s performance art piece, *Dirty Sweat*. The performance centers on the necessity of inhabiting one’s body in its “momentary state,” using it as a vehicle to explore inner desires and urgencies. Rota explained, “The performance originated in 2018 from an older work, an ancestral need to express pain through the conflicted and romantic relationship with one’s own body. Traumatic responses remain within us for a long time, like muscular memory; but pleasure gradually neutralizes it, reversing it. Therefore, even during this action, I am listening to the needs of each part of my body, challenging momentary desires by saturating them.”
This choreographic practice, employing an interdisciplinary approach, features seemingly instinctive and spontaneous movements that are, in reality, guided by a progressive narrative structure. This structure aims to evoke an ascending and participatory climax in the audience, culminating in the resolution of a complex theme like internal injury.
The performance begins with a whisper, a voice “audible only from afar,” followed by the resounding power of a female voice finding its strength in redemption. An intuitive dance ensues, a process of seeking and finding through the senses, in a continuous reshaping. Rota explores the female body starting from her own. In this new space of departure, the intent is to “not stay in form,” as the artist stated, and to reclaim invisible connections between limbs and space, creating a mapping that allows the audience to decipher a shared sense of belonging.
