Fabrizio Gifuni and Stefano Bartezzaghi | When words become performance

Fabrizio Gifuni and Stefano Bartezzaghi | When words become performance Thursday, 8 October 2026 | 6:30 pm | Piazza del Sole, Bellinzona Sconfinare Festival

A written word is not yet a spoken word. It can remain on the page, preserving an intention, waiting for a body to pass through it. Then the actor arrives: a pause, a breath, a glance, a crack in the voice. What was once text becomes rhythm, image, performance.

The opening event of the seventh edition of Sconfinare Festival brings together two figures who, from different perspectives, explore the moment when language takes shape before our eyes. Fabrizio Gifuni, one of the most compelling and accomplished actors in contemporary Italian theatre and cinema, has built a career in which every role becomes an exercise in listening, precision and embodiment—from his encounters with the great works of Italian literature and history to his most recent performances for the screen. Stefano Bartezzaghi, semiotician, essayist and scholar of wordplay and creative processes, has long explored language as a fluid, intelligent and ambiguous material: a device capable of generating meaning, misunderstanding, memory and surprise.

Starting from the actor's craft and the power of words in cinema, their conversation will examine the relationship between text and interpretation. What happens when a line moves from the screenplay to the face of the person who speaks it? How much lies in the words themselves, and how much in what remains suspended between a gesture, a silence or an edit? And how does cinema transform language into a visual and emotional experience?

Moving between the art of performance and the intelligence of language, Gifuni and Bartezzaghi will take the audience inside the invisible workshop of the stage, where words are not merely spoken but rehearsed, chosen, held back and returned to us. An opening event that places the Festival at the precise point where language meets the screen, and words begin to become cinema.

Fabrizio Gifuni is one of Italy's most acclaimed actors in both theatre and film. He has worked with directors including Marco Tullio Giordana, Paolo Virzì, Marco Bellocchio, Francesca Archibugi, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Gianni Amelio and Francesca Comencini. On stage he has created and performed numerous original projects, including Gadda e Pasolini, antibiografia di una nazione and Con il vostro irridente silenzio, dedicated to the letters and prison writings of Aldo Moro. Throughout his career he has received many prestigious awards, including the David di Donatello and the Nastro d'Argento. His most recent screen credits include Exterior Night (Esterno notte, 2022), The Time It Takes (Il tempo che ci vuole, 2024) and Portobello (2025), the television series directed by Marco Bellocchio.

Stefano Bartezzaghi is a semiotician, essayist and journalist. He is Associate Professor at IULM University in Milan, where he teaches Semiotics of Creativity, Creativity and Art, and Storytelling for Places of Art. He is also a regular contributor to la Repubblica, writing columns on language, wordplay and contemporary forms of communication. His research spans puzzles and word games, humour, creativity, the relationship between words and images, literature and the visual arts. His recent publications include Mettere al mondo il mondo: Tutto quanto facciamo per essere detti creativi e chi ce lo fa fare (Bompiani, 2021), Enigmistica (Treccani, 2025), Le parole fanno il solletico (Salani, 2025), co-authored with Daniel Pennac, and Bozze non corrette (2025) and Ultimo giro di bozze (2026), co-authored with Pier Mauro Tamburini and published by Mondadori.