After graduating in Literature from the University of Milan, he enrolled in the theatre practitioners’ course at the Civica Scuola d’Arte Drammatica, but did not complete the training cycle, instead going on to work with Paolo Grassi at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. At the same time, he began working as a theatre critic, writing for numerous newspapers over the years: Avanti!, Corriere della Sera, and the Sunday edition of Il Sole24 Ore. From 1986 to 1995, he directed the Piccolo Teatro School of Dramatic Art, which he named after Paolo Grassi. He was a lecturer on the CLEAC degree programme in Economics of Art and Culture at Bocconi University. In 2016, he launched “Quaderni del FIT”, a project conceived by Carmelo Rifici (director of the LAC) and Paola Tripoli (director of the Lugano International Festival of Theatre and Contemporary Performing Arts). Together with the young critics Maddalena Giovannelli and Francesca Serrazanetti, Palazzi produced five publications dedicated to exploring the international contemporary performing arts scene. 

The concept of “unmastery”, drawn from Julietta Singh’s theoretical work, does not imply a renunciation of competence, nor does it celebrate improvisation for its own sake. It names, rather, the capacity to suspend one’s certainties temporarily, allowing room for what is not yet known. Singh shows how deeply the idea of mastery runs through Western modernity: to master and possess a body of knowledge, a technique, a discipline, a body. Unmastery opens instead onto interdependence in creation, an encounter with others, and transformation as a condition of knowledge itself.
From this perspective, scenic composition does not advance through the accumulation of skills alone, but through deviations, missteps, unexpected intuitions and encounters capable of unsettling acquired knowledge. Error is not the opposite of knowledge; it is one of the generative conditions of invention.
In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam shows how failure, once released from the logic of performance and success, can become a space of critical possibility. To fail can mean interrupting dominant models of excellence, efficiency and productivity, and thereby making other forms of knowledge, relation and life imaginable.
What must be reconsidered, within this framework, is the position of mastery within pedagogical
processes. This does not mean invoking an overused rhetoric of horizontality, or treating experience as the sole ground of knowledge.
On the contrary, FAULT recognises the essential role of artists, directors, choreographers and scholars whose established practices can act as catalysts for forms of knowledge that circulate, are questioned and are reinvented.

Within FAULT, transmission is understood as an embodied and situated process. It is not an inheritance handed down vertically from one generation to the next, but a practice produced through concrete encounters among different bodies, experiences, disciplines, territories and temporalities.
For this reason, FAULT does not take the form of a conventional school for actors or directors. It is conceived instead as a temporary environment for research, shared life and composition, in which artists, scholars and participants exchange processes, questions and tools, making transmission itself a creative practice.