Radici for Urban Travel Machines

The European project Urban Travel Machines brought together three art universities, forty-five visual arts students and fifteen poetry performers from across Europe, with the visionary aim of renewing the literary sector through immersive technology. By merging slam poetry with 360° video-mapping inside planetariums, the project explored new ways of engaging audiences and expanding the possibilities of poetic performance.

The performance was built on Radici, a poem by Eleonora Fisco, which explores the fragile boundary between dialogue and conflict in the choices of those who remain in marginal or depopulating places—such as her native Sicilian town—and those who leave in search of opportunity, while facing the practical and emotional weight of voluntary exile.

In collaboration with students from Aalto University in Helsinki, Radici was translated into an immersive environment. During a five-day artistic residency, a virtual avatar was created to mirror the poet’s movements in real time through the use of a motion capture suit.

For the performances at the Tartu Planetarium (Estonia) as part of the Prima Vista Festival and at the Brussels Planetarium during the Brussels Poetry Festival, the work evolved into a 360° animation projected inside the dome, enhanced by a generative soundscape created from migration data, adding an autonomous yet thematically resonant layer to the performance.

An accompanying zine/poster combined riso-printed stills from the animation with the bilingual text of Radici, offering audiences a tangible extension of the immersive poetic journey.