Marisa Garreffa

Writer and Performance Artist

Marisa Garreffa is a writer and performance artist based in Florence. Her work explores the intersection between live performance practice, trauma recovery, and telling our stories as an act of recovery, resistance, and power. 

Marisa is an associate tutor for the Venice International Performance Art Week and a speaker and advocates for mental health and gender studies across multiple institutions. 

Marisa works with a circular creative process where words are generated in real-time through her live performance art, spoken word, and body-based trainings. These texts are then transcribed and refined through editing and research into multiple outcomes from the poetic to the theoretical. 

In performance, she draws on traditions of oral storytelling, woven with memory, poetry, and contemporary mythologies of her-self, to give voice to complex interactions between gender violence, mental illness, mental health, and generational inheritance of grief. Breaking silence. Breaking shame. Exploring ways to speak the unspeakable, even when the story exists in non-verbal or incoherent forms, a common effect of trauma.

Unlocking Stories from the Body offers a gentle process to bypass the mind and enter the body, while immersing fully in the environment around you. To discover what memories, stories, images, and dreamings are contained within and without. Every time you open the senses and enter the body, it will tell you something new. We learn how to listen to the language of your body, and the language of place. When deep memory speaks, even stones awaken to listen.

These sessions are a series of guided sensory and meditative exercises for writers, performers, artists, or anyone interested in hearing what their body might have to say. However you express yourself, this workshop will offer you another entry into inspiration, and new ways of withdrawing material from your inner world.