Created as part of the collaboration between mk and LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura for the Lugano Dance Project festival, MOBILE HOMES – Album degli abitanti del Nuovo Mondo (“Album of the inhabitants of the New World”) is a project that creates connections between different yet complementary specialist skills related to the theme of corporeality and living: an exploration of the relationships between bodies and things, understood as an environmental possibility of reinventing space.

At the beginning of 2024, the LAC helped arrange a meeting between Michele Di Stefano, the choreographer and artistic director of the mk group, and the architect Riccardo Blumer, a professor and former director of the Academy of Architecture of the University of Lugano (USI) in Mendrisio, with the aim of creating a project that would explore dance and design, developed with students of the Academy during the spring semester and hosted at the former watchmaker’s factory Diantus Watch in Castel San Pietro during the festival.
The workshop combines choreographic systems and machine design through a dynamic and procedural approach in order to generate unpredictable events: anatomies and objects enter into dialogue within a single moving landscape, which the audience can visit and traverse during the durational performance at the Lugano Dance Project. A shared environment that arises from the relationship between anatomies and constructions, different atmospheric densities, permeable qualities of bodies and objects, waste, entropy, thawing, the materiality of sound, structural tangents, and soft collapses.
Michele Di Stefano's work is enriched by an exhibition curated by the Atelier Blumer that presents the history of the former watchmaker's shop and its urban and production development from a point of view that goes beyond just the architectural. One of the goals of the exhibition is to communicate the importance of artefacts and architecture, to remember the history of places, promoting their preservation and reuse, turning them into incubators of culture.

The MOBILE HOMES project is the initial stage of PANORAMIC BANANA, organised in collaboration with the USI Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio.