Anatomy of a Cave is an interdisciplinary research project that weaves together the fields of environmental geoscience, visual and performing arts, geopoetics, and mythology to engage with a neolithic cave in my ancestral homeland as a site for embodied remembrance and healing. This project focuses on one of the oldest mining sites in Europe, the Grotta della Monaca in Sant’Agata di Esaro, and researches the history of the cave as an ancient burial ground, site of extraction, place of ritual, and living ecosystem. The project will take the form of a multimedia performance installation at the site of the cave that is an investigation into the epistemologies that co-develop from sites of rupture (bodily, ancestral, and ecological).

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The central question of this project explores how settlers of the U.S. can employ interdisciplinary creative methodologies to critically engage with the notions and physical entities of a “homeland” and be re-shaped through the geopoetics and politics of reconnection. How can the archive of the body come into a consensual, collaborative relationship with one's familial, ecological archive?

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This project focuses on the relationships between many forms of ‘movement’ – geologic, diasporic, genealogical, and bodily. The work incorporates research on the movement of stones and minerals and how the geology of the cave “moves” through my body as a descendant and inheritor of its specific mythology. This research follows trade routes established for the movement of minerals and pigments from the village as well as the migration routes of my family members from Italy to the United States. I use movement as a way to explore bodily memory and improvise a dialogue with my body’s genetic landscape. I pull from my past research and

study in somatics, trauma and decolonial studies, memory, and embodiment to shape my inquiry.

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