Federica Dauri is a performance artist, choreographer, and director. Her research unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance art, visual arts, and somatic practices, approaching the body as a perceptual, political, and poetic space: a site of memory, relation, and transformation. Her practice spans choreography, long-durational performance, installation, and mixed media, with a particular focus on intimacy, vulnerability, desire, and the exploration of limits.
She trained at the National Academy of Dance in Rome, where she studied classical and contemporary dance and choreographic composition. In 2009, she received a scholarship to work in New York with choreographer Trisha Brown, an experience that proved pivotal in the development of her research into movement and composition. She subsequently deepened her study of Butoh and Eurythmy with Masaki Iwana and Akira Kasai, and continued her training and artistic research in Amsterdam, focusing on performance and visual arts.
Between 2010 and 2021, she lived between Amsterdam and Berlin, developing an interdisciplinary practice grounded in the dialogue between body, space, duration, and presence. Her work has been presented at numerous contemporary art institutions, museums, galleries, and festivals across Europe and the United States.
Since 2016, she has collaborated with artist Peaches as a choreographer and performer, taking part in her tours and, among other projects, The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour (2022–2023) and the documentary Teaches of Peaches, awarded the Teddy Award at the Berlinale.
She also collaborates with performance artist Ron Athey and co-leads, alongside Athey, Hermes Pittakos, and Michele Occelli, Darkness Visible, an immersive performance-making intensive dedicated to artistic research, experimentation, and creation.
Alongside her choreographic and performance practice, Dauri is currently co-directing, together with visual artist Hanna Schaich, her first hybrid feature-length documentary, exploring the intersections between documentary language, performance, and visual arts. The film is produced by Mischief Films Vienna and supported by the Austrian Ministry of Culture – Film Department.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE
My artistic research begins with the body — as perceptual space, material presence, and a site of knowledge. I approach the body as a sensitive and mutable territory, capable of revealing what precedes language and often escapes representation.
My practice has developed across performance, visual art, somatic practices, and moving image. My earlier works, presented primarily in museums and galleries, explored the body in relation to sculptural structures and materials that shaped and restricted its movement. In Kheperer, for example, the body is confined between two surfaces, adapting to an extremely narrow space until its human form becomes ambiguous — somewhere between anatomy, organism, and living sculpture. This tension between constraint and transformation runs through much of my work from this period.
Slowness, duration, stillness, and limitation became central to my research. In long-durational performance, time acts directly on the body, gradually altering breath, perception, endurance, and presence. Movement is reduced to a minimum, sometimes to the point of almost disappearing. Subtle shifts, tensions, and transformations become visible through duration. The audience is also invited into a different experience of time: free to enter, stay, and leave, each person encounters the work according to their own rhythm.Part of my practice continues to unfold through the relationship between body, sculpture, and matter. In works such as O and Limen, sculpture is not conceived as scenography, but as a physical device with which the body enters into relation and through which its presence is altered.
CorpOrale emerged from a collaboration with composer and sound artist Elisa Batti, with whom i collaborate since almost 10 years, exploring the relationship between body, voice, sound, and space. Conceived as a performative sound installation, the work allows voice and sound to inhabit the space alongside the body. The voice is approached as physical matter — breath, vibration, resonance — extending beyond the body and reshaping the space around it; the voice as presence, gesture, and embodied experience.
In recent years, my research has shifted from the body as an individual territory towards what happens between bodies. Intimacy, vulnerability, desire, and care have become central to my practice, drawing my attention to the space between self and other — to how one body can affect, support, depend on, and transform another.
ConTatto Performance grew out of this shift. The performance is rooted in the real-life relationship between two men. Their everyday gestures — supporting one another, coming closer, giving their weight to each other, caring for one another — became the basis for a choreographic language built around proximity and minimal movement. Here, the limit becomes a threshold between self and other: touch is not simply a physical gesture, but a way of knowing, a space where autonomy, dependence, care, and vulnerability are constantly renegotiated.
Alongside my performance practice, moving image has become an increasingly important part of my work. I approach video as a continuation of my research into duration, perception, and the body. If performance allows me to work with the physical presence of the body in real time, moving image allows me to reshape that experience: to stretch or compress time, bring the body into extreme proximity, fragment or isolate it, and make subtle gestures and transformations visible in ways that live performance cannot. The camera becomes a way of looking more closely, revealing details, tensions, and shifts in presence that might otherwise remain almost imperceptible.
This exploration has developed in close dialogue with videoartist and filmmaker Hanna Schaich, with whom I have built an ongoing collaborative practice across performance, poetry, and moving image. Our work grows from the encounter between these different languages, and from the ways in which body, text, and image can translate, alter, and reshape one another.
This investigation into body, intimacy, and image has expanded into cinema through ConTatto, our first feature-length documentary, co-directed with Hanna Schaich. Combining documentary observation with performative and metaphorical imagery, the film follows two queer couples in Rome as they navigate love, desire, transformation, and the complexities of staying together. Through their intimate lives, ConTatto engages with gender transition, the desire for assisted suicide, sex workers’ rights, feminism, care, and self-determination, while remaining closely rooted in the everyday gestures through which relationships are lived and negotiated. At its core lies a question: what does it mean to commit to love — and to keep choosing it through change?
With Debora Vrizzi as Director of Photography, ConTatto has completed principal photography and is now entering post-production in Vienna. The film is produced by Mischief Films Vienna, with support from the Austrian Ministry of Culture and the State of Vorarlberg.