Artist statement - I believe in three things: the ineffability of art, the cultivation of caring, and autonomy.
I belong to a legacy of process-focused experimental art that constantly finds its inspiration in current and historic social realities.
I am an architect of experiences. While my background is in dance and choreography, with movement at the heart of my work, I use all media to create a cohesive environment in which the viewer is invited to both experience and perform. I was raised in Italy in an Italian/American family of installation artists and architects. My performances live and breathe the dualities existing within a multicultural environment, as multidimensional works. My artwork never belongs to one medium, just as it belongs to both cultures. I believe in the complexity of layered concepts. Dance, time, duration, motion, movement, and performance are always central to my architectures. Even in my sculptural experiments there is always a performative element. It may not be a body in space, it may be an ice cube melting, liquids being absorbed over a length of time, or gravity, but there is always a dance, a play of movement. I am interested in crafting creative environments where people are always invited to change, transform, and constantly re-discover oneself.
My work fosters a conscious world as it uses performance and the body to bring to the surface questions and ideas that are relevant to the contemporary human condition—questions that allow viewers to empathize, transforming their perceptions by experiencing the world through a prospective that may not be at the forefront of their daily experience.
My work is constantly questioning autonomy and decision making performed by both the viewers and the artists I collaborate with. I aim to contribute art that is a powerful cultural tool for self-definition, as opposed to an instrument of propaganda.
BIO : ALICE GOSTI is an architect of experiences.
Amazing interview with Alice Gosti, by Sebastien Scandiuzzi and Haley Watson. Which aired on Nancy Guppy's Art Zone.ALICE GOSTI is an Italian-American immigrant choreographer, hybrid performance artist, curator and architect of experiences, working between Seattle and Europe since 2008.
Born and raised by the dynamic art duo SANDFORD&GOSTI in Perugia, Italy, she trained at Associazione Culturale Dance Gallery with Valentina Romito and Rita Petrone. At 19, Alice moved to Seattle, where she received a B. A. in Dance from the University of Washington with a focus in choreography and experimental film.
Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, commissions and residencies including being a recipient of the 2012 Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance Award, the 2012 ImPulsTanz danceWEB scholarship, the 2015 inaugural Intiman Theatre’s Emerging Artist Program as a Director, the Bossak/Heilbron Award, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Award, and an Artist Trust GAP Grant and Fellowship. Gosti was also a two-time Cornish Artist Incubator Awardee, Velocity Dance Center’s 2015 Artist-in-Residence, is Seattle University 2016 Artist-in-Residency at the University of Washington.
In 2016 she received the prestigious National Dance Project from the New England Foundation for the Arts for the Production and touring of her next new project - Material Deviance in Contemporary American Culture.
In 2015, Velocity commissioned, produced, and presented Gosti’s critically acclaimed 5-hour immersive performance "How to become a partisan" — a multi-disciplinary event inspired by the Italian Partisan Movement, the unremembered women who changed the course of history and the concept of resistance.
Gosti’s work has been commissioned and presented nationally, by On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Seattle Art Museum, Intiman Theatre, Vilcek Foundation at the Joyce (NY), ODC Theater (SF) as part of the SCUBA national touring network, Risk/Rewards Festival (PDX) and Performance Works Northwest (PDX).
Internationally, her works have been presented in Italy by Associazione Culturale Dance Gallery, Teatro Stabile Dell’Umbria, Premio Equilibrio Roma, Rassegna per la Giovane Danza D’Autore, Anticorpi XL, FAST di Terni, Verdecoprente/Associazione Ippocampo and Museo Civico di Palazzo della Penna.
Dance Magazine has described Gosti’s work as “unruly yet rigorous, feminine yet rebellious, task-like yet mischievous“, and SeattleDances.org described "How to become a partisan" as, “hypnotic, meditative, and profoundly beautiful, it left you with a certain sense of calm despite the heavy issues at its core.”
Gosti has worked as a performer and collaborator with artists Sara Shelton Mann, Keith Hennessy, Carolyn Carlson, Mark Haim, Bruno Collinet, Christopher Huggins, Amy O’Neal amongst others.
She is the founder of Yellow Fish // Epic Durational Performance Festival, the world’s only festival dedicated exclusively to durational performance—international artists create original performances presented at at various sites throughout Seattle.