Alan Alpenfelt and Giulietta Mottini
Foto: Alan Alpenfelt
Alan is a Swiss performance and installation artist, theatre director and trainer. As of 2021 he coordinates Luminanza - a reactor for Swiss contemporary drama in the Italian language. He was co-awarded tbe Swiss Performing Arts prize in 2022 together with his fellow artists of the Ticino-is-Burning movement. Alan's interest is on audience-based art and how to guide it into having a specific role in the dramaturgy. He has shown work at Ural Industrial Biennial (Russia), AltoFest (Malta & Naples), Castel dei Mondi (Andria), Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection (London), FIT Festival (Lugano), Marrakech (Morocco), SonOhr Bern, and the UBU prize winning LAC’s Lingua Madre project (Before the Revolution Remix by Ahmed El Attar). He staged Jackie by Elfriede Jelinek and adapted radio plays for the stage by Dürrenmatt and Beckett. He was selected for Rencontres du Théâtre Suisse (2016).
Foto: Zoé Cornelius
Born in 1994 in Lausanne, Giulietta Mottini is a writer and literary critic. A graduate of the Swiss Literary Institute and ENSATT, she was awarded the Ernst Göhner scholarship for young talented artists from 2019 to 2021. She published her first poetry text, (une) existence, on a weekly scale in the journal Nioques (Fabrique editions), followed by two short stories, Dead Letter Mail (Hèbe editions) and Comme un bonbon (Plaisir de Lire editions). She is the librettist for the creation of the Operalab collective, Dernière expédition au pays des merveilles, which was staged in January 2025 at the Comédie de Genève. Her play Ne surtout pas diminuer les nuisances was staged at the Tour Vagabonde by Buro d’Archi. In the spring of 2025, she was in residence at the Maison Rousseau et Littérature to work on her novel À peine une motte de terre. Since 2021, she has also been a literary critic for Viceversa Littérature.
Project
I had never heard about the tears of Odysseus. And yet, the hero weeps often during his odyssey: he grieves the loss of his companions, is overcome by despair, or simply moved to tears. I had imagined him as brave, courageous, and unwavering. Who had passed on this version of the story to me? And Penelope—what had I been told about her? What did she feel during the twenty years of her husband’s absence? Did she really do nothing but wait for his return?
In this new project, "Matière première: Odyssée", I want to work on a reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey that allows space for the transformation and modernization of ancient myths. Which mythical figures shape our imagination? Who tells the stories?
I will explore our need to dream of an extraordinary existence, as well as the desire to live a life rooted in the everyday, in certainty and belonging. I also want to examine the figure of the aoidos—a poet in ancient Greece who, at the end of banquets, sang of gods and heroes. The joy and necessity of gathering as individuals and as a society to tell stories will be at the heart of this project.
These questions will be central to the mentoring process with Alan Alpenfelt and will result in a text and form that allow for close interaction with the audience—a space where we can rethink how we form society and invent new shared imaginaries together.
