Salotto Somatico is a project by Yiskah Jessica Cestaro, headquartered in Bologna. It was founded in the context of SOMA Center for Mind-Body Research and Practice, a program that has been offering a wide range of somatic and body-mind experiences in the Bologna area since 2016, aimed at promoting personal well-being.

Salotto Somatico focuses all its initiatives on the moving body and performative research, building a network with artists, researchers, and teachers. It is a project driven by the desire to create a context of engagement and participation, in which to nurture, inform, and train the body in multiple directions in order to expand the perceptual boundaries of meaning, relationship, and knowledge.

Dance, the Axis Syllabus, and somatic and performative research form the foundation of the program.

Salotto explores the body’s multifaceted relationships through a multidisciplinary program and positions itself on a pre-political plane, with the intention of engaging with and fulfilling the sensory requirements of feeling, distinguishing, choosing, and acting. In this context, it rejects any form of disembodied relationship and any purely conceptual ethics that do not respect the body’s physiological needs. It does not yield to the concepts of training, domestication, commodification, or the instrumentalization of the body.

The term “Salotto” evokes the literary salon as a place of regular gathering, where knowledge spreads beyond the circuits of institutionalized power and becomes somatic—shifting from the intellect to the body and placing the body at the center of interest, perception, and knowledge.