Hipermembrana forms part of Membrana, Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca‘s experimental and transnational project centred on systematurgy – a dramaturgy generated through computational systems. For the Turin production, Vanessa Vozzo, artistic director of Malafestival, the work’s producing organisation, serves as executive producer and fundraiser.

The production brings together 35 people, including students selected in Turin from MultiDAMS and Cinema and Media Engineering, who work alongside Italian and Spanish professionals. The team combines performers, documentation specialists, audiovisual and multimedia producers, and programmers working with interactive systems, integrating their different areas of expertise into the realisation of Hipermembrana.
Hipermembrana in Turin is an interactive multimedia and mechatronic performance by Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca that stages the tension between two opposing dimensions of human experience: the rational world governed by machines and the emotional, organic and animal realm driven by instinct. Irreverent, visceral and Dionysian, the work draws on the topography of Dante’s Inferno, the myth of the Minotaur and elements of cellular biology to construct a dark and unstable universe in which technological control collides with desire, flesh and primordial energy.

The performance rejects a single, linear narrative. Real and simulated events overlap inside a responsive environment composed of bodies, interactive image and sound, electromechanical prostheses, expanded interfaces, dreskeletons, parazitebots, multiprojection and interactive lighting. Sensors allow the performers to activate and transform audiovisual events in real time, so that every gesture intervenes in the unfolding dramaturgy and continuously reconfigures the relationship between the organic and the technological.
Three scenic strategies coexist and intersect: a musical and literary layer controlled through Antúnez’s dreskeleton; a performative layer in which bodies and sensors trigger interactive events; and a video layer conceived as an interactive film that expands and transforms the stage. Their superimposition generates a hybrid language situated between robotics, theatre, videogames, concert, fable, site-specific practice and action art.
Technology does not function as a neutral tool or a scenic accessory: it becomes an active agent within a collective and ceremonial space where bodies, projected images, sound, emotion and machine control remain in permanent tension. The performance creates a contemporary ritual in which the boundaries between human, animal and machine are continually exposed, crossed and reimagined.