Our story

Amigdala is an artistic collective founded in 2005 in Modena, a city where it develops projects of festivals, performances, and territorial research processes each year. Today, it is established as a Third Sector Entity and has its legal headquarters in Modena, at Via Nicolò Biondo 86. Here you can find our Statute and the ways to join the Association.

If we start from the name, we find in the meaning of “amigdala” a crossroads of possible paths. The term “amigdala” refers to prehistoric tools made from thin flint blades shaped like an almond, which leads us to the second meaning of this word. The almond, as a seed, takes us into the world of fairy tales, where seeds are among the elements with the greatest power of transformation and transition to other worlds. Finally, the amigdala is a particular cluster of nerve nuclei, located in the innermost part of both temporal lobes of the brain, whose purpose is to regulate strong emotions.

Its multiple meanings and this oscillation between fairy tales, craftsmanship, and emotion resonated greatly—and still resonates today, after twenty years of the Collective’s life—with the identity we aspired to and still hope to embody, which is that of a multidisciplinary collective that proposes itself in reality as a sensitive infrastructure, where biodiversity, equity, and accessibility are offered, promoting horizontal governance processes that break away from the coercive logics of capitalist work systems that invade our imagination.

Amigdala operates with a specific focus on site-specific and community-specific creation methodologies, staying at street level to intercept people, voices, and memories, with a view to listening to the explored territories and activating resonances.

The projects initiated in 2008 under the name Periferico, a work-device which today we define as a festival, have changed form and size many times over the years, remaining always faithful to its vocation of acting in peripheral urban areas or those undergoing significant transformation.

Amigdala firmly believes in the possibility of expressing and embodying a collective, intergenerational, intercultural, and intersectional thought, both inside and outside its working group. Amigdala adheres to a transfeminist and anti-fascist perspective as an ethical/political positioning, rejecting hierarchical and patriarchal logic in favor of inclusive processes, and promoting artistic and cultural tools for collective reflection against sexism, and discrimination based on gender, race, and social class.

_{ph Futura Tittaferrante performance Elementare di Collettivo Amigdala, Fondazione Pietà dei Turchini, Napoli Altofest 2018}