Pontormium Fleshmind

Hangar teatri, Trieste, December 2025

VR work in progress

Pontormium Fleshmind is an evolving matrix of performative ritual in mixed reality, designed to regenerate lost works originating from pre-actionism or the early stages of body art.

It explores the potential of digital reinterpretation and regeneration applied to a lost masterpiece of Mannerism: Jacopo da Pontormo’s fresco cycle, originally painted for the choir of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence between 1546 and 1556.

This work, destroyed in the 18th century, depicted naked figures with soft, interwoven forms, sliding over one another like reptiles. These varied bodies, in their diverse morphologies, were immersed in a state of collective ecstasy, embodying a radical vision of the Last Judgment: a vertiginous fall of clinging bodies tumbling into viscous abysses, clutching one another in terror.

Described by his contemporaries as an “excess of flesh” and an “ecstatic excess of death,” this fresco conveyed Pontormo’s hallucinatory vision—haunted by scenes even Dante could never have imagined. Celebrated for its expressive power as much as it was condemned for transgressing the pictorial and moral norms of its time, it remains a mythical work.

Based on the few surviving preparatory drawings and entries from Pontormo’s personal diary, Pontormium FleshMind offers a performative matrix where body digitization, performative interaction, and mixed realities intertwine.

By exploring the interfaces between materiality and invisible realities, this digital ritual engages a reflection on the nature of lost artworks and their potential to be reborn in contemporary forms. This structure weaves together programmed arts, the hybrid dimensions of digital creation, and corporeality as a field for critical and aesthetic experimentation.

Through a cyber-archaeological approach, it revisits historical corporeal practices through a contemporary digital and performative lens.

Towards a transmuting fresco

Ritual of cyber-archaeological transmutation of the lost and destroyed fresco of Pontormo, "The San Lorenzo cycle"

Digital fragment generated through a cyber-archaeological virtual reality reconstruction of the lost San Lorenzo cycle, the vanished masterpiece of Pontormo. 

A PERFORMANCE BY DAVID LEGRAND & PAOLA PISANI
Original concept by David Legrand
scenario : David Legrand & Paola Pisani
Set design : Paola Pisani
Multimedia scenography : David Legrand
Live performers : Antonella Barbieri, Pavel Berdon, Denise Cellamare, Alberto d’Orlando, Michele Lodolo, Elena Macoratti, Viola Mombelli, Martina Regina, Cristina Rei, Samuel Saia, Marco Landini, Artemisia Kairos, Graziella Savastano, Andrea Stebel, Ilaria Vecchiet
Choreography, lighting dramaturgy, video documentation : Paola Pisani
VR & 3D Design and Development : Collectif artistique Pipeline.exe/Étienne Muller, Léo Sallanon, Colombe Delacoste, Chloé Hereau
Sound design : Philippe Zunino
Original Music : Vincenzo Ninci
Voice of Pontormo : Aldo Vivoda
Curator : Paola Pisani
Created during a residency at : Trieste – Hangar Teatri – Gruppo 78 I Corpi in Trasformazione – 2025
Production: Gruppo 78, Italie
Supported by : : Antre Peaux, Bourges
Special Thanks : Calogero Chinnici, Roberto Srelz, Centofoto APS, Cristina Lombardo, Pierpaolo Ciana, Raffaella Busdon, Marta Pari, Gruppo 78, Hangar Teatri, Théâtre Petit Soleil, Andrea Sandro, Sylvie Picault, Mick Texier, Erland Malmberg, Gaëlle Tournier