An event celebrating Rossella Biscotti's decade-long project The Trial, which has now been published as a book. Presented in collaboration with the Rijksakademie, the event features a conversation between the artist and philosopher Aaron Schuster, followed by a performative reading.

〰️ 〰️ 〰️ 〰️

The Trial centres on the landmark “April 7th” trial, held in 1983-84 in Rome against members of the Italian leftist movement Autonomia Operaia, which notably included public intellectuals such as Toni Negri and Paolo Virno. Over more than a decade, Rossella Biscotti has worked extensively with the materials of the trial—its sound recordings, spatial and architectural elements, and the people directly affected by it—revisiting and rearticulating them across different contexts. The publication chronicles the development of this seminal project and reflects on how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time.

The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial’s archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script, The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. 

The Trial resists closure, offering instead a mutable framework for engaging with political history, collective memory, and the performative nature of justice. 

〰️ 〰️ 〰️ 〰️ 〰️

In the conversation with Aaron Schuster,  Rossella Biscotti will elaborate on this historical fracture, considering what it means for artists to work with historical and political material. The conversation also offers a moment to reflect on the broader implications of this trial and its resonance today. The conversation is interwoven with videos from the project and is followed by a collective performative reading of the trial transcripts.

ACCESS NOTES:

• If I Can't Dance is located on the second floor of a historic building and, unfortunately, is not accessible by elevator. The venue is a former medical theatre dating from the 1920s and retains its original seating. Access across the tiered seating (tribunes) is via two narrow staircases.

• Two gender-neutral toilets are located on the first floor.

• The event is held in spoken English. The reading can followed via a printed text.