phased / romantic
phased / romantic is a collaboration between Alice De Crais and Ant Hampton (and an anagram of their surnames) that began in 2025 following work together on a Rome iteration of Ant’s ‘IN VIEW OF WHAT WE STAND TO LOSE’. They created ‘Momento Spento’ in September 2025 for IRA festival in Soverato, Calabria, a one-off, largely unrehearsed outdoors performance involving 9 horses and riders, two Fiat 500s, an Alfa Romeo, a local choir, and percussionist Daniele De Santis. A month later, a first, outdoors version of USCITA was developed in Modena and Cagliari with the support of Periferico Festival and Sardegna Teatro.
phased / romantic creates performance interventions in areas of Southern Europe marked by fragile ecosystems and the tourist industry. The project questions our psychological and spiritual approaches to these territories and to ‘free time’ in general, informed by visions of de-growth and ‘buen vivir’ articulated by philosophers such as Hardmut Rosa (Resonance) and Byung-Chul Han (Vita Contemplativa / In Praise of Inactivity), stretching back by extension to Transcendentalism and 19th century German Romanticism.