alice de crais

work

about







LOVECORE
2026 | London
installation


Featured at Greatorex as a part of their Pro Radix programme for Whitechapel Gallery Backyard Biennal.

LOVECORE proposes care as something free, immaterial and collectively authored. Through live, one-to-one encounters between strangers, the work asks: what is produced when people who do not know each other share an act of care? What kind of intimacy becomes possible, even briefly, in a public space?

Human connection, tenderness and the act of showing up for one another are not peripheral to life; they are its substance. Yet under capitalism, the language of care and connection has been hollowed out and turned inward, reduced to individual practice, personal optimisation and private resilience. What is collective, relational and unquantifiable is often devalued because it produces nothing the market can easily measure or commodify.

Against this, revaluing the intimate becomes a political strategy: a way of resisting heteropatriarchy and strengthening collective liberation. Not as a concession to the logic of productivity, but as a refusal of it.

The work is grounded in the understanding that our intimate lives hold the conditions for both personal and political transformation. 

special thanks to

Veronica Grazioli, Simone Martis, Mariana Leal, Gaia Debuchy, Marianna di Majo Norante, Joshua McEwen, Aurelia Temi, Penelope Alice Owen, Giorgia Grassi, Bibiana Puglisi, Sofia Bordin, Pablo Temboury, Irene Di Filippo.


BROKEN SCREENS 
2025 | London
live performance, 50min


Broken Screens is a performance work examining political paralysis and the subtle architectures that shape contemporary experience. Four figures move through a landscape of glitches, delays, and fragmented gestures, continually interrupted by systems that feel both mundane and overwhelming.

Drawing on theories of structural violence, mediatised dramaturgy, and failure, the piece frames malfunction as material. Scenes loop, stall, or restart; bodies negotiate with invisible forces; meaning surfaces in moments where action misfires or refuses coherence.

Broken Screens asks what remains possible inside structures that interrupt us, and how attention shifts when movement is no longer smooth, linear, or fully in our control.

Developed as part of MA Advance Theatre Practice at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama FORMAT Festival 2025.
CREDITS

Concept, text, direction: Alice De Crais, Maddie Hurley &  Xiaoyu Liu 

Performers: Ali Yuraw (Yuan-Ling Chen), Stephen Ledger, Shelvin Rachael, Poni 

Photography: Yingying Xie

With special thanks to Sam Ward, James Christensen, Pablo Temboury 


MOMENTO SPENTO
2025 | Soverato
live performance, 1h


A large, unrehearsed procession-spectacle with horses, singers and old FIAT 500s, elements gleaned from the fortunate scribbles of a girl on holiday who almost forgot her dream.


A dream of truly free time, probably sparked by her holiday reading: Bjung Chul-Han, who writes that “Inactivity has a logic of its own, its own language, temporality, architecture, magnificence – even its own magic. It is not a weakness or defect but rather an intensity”.


Working from her notes, and with almost no prior rehearsal, she tries to bring this dream of truly ‘free time’ back to life by assembling its cast from existing communities in Soverato: an audience under a darkening sky, a drummer, a choir, several horses and old Fiat 500s, with their riders and drivers


MOMENTO SPENTO is produced in the frame of DETOURISTIKI, an ongoing project by Ant Hampton exploring live art in relation to tourism and 'free time', based on research carried out in Palermo (supported by Teatro Bastardo) and Athens (supported by Onassis AiR).

This performance was commissioned by IRA festival 2025, Soverato, Calabria.
 Dedicated to the memory of Lynn Hatzius.CREDITS
Concept, text, direction: Ant Hampton
Feedback and support: Alice De Crais
Performer: Alice De Crais
Percussion / prepared drums: Daniele De Santis
Photography: Angelo Maggio
Videography: Isabella Marino


With the extraordinary participation of the Soverato Choir, Centro Ippico Valle Dei Mulini / Scuderia Cricelli, Auto Club Soverato


With thanks to Ida Raynal, Giulia Cricelli, Chiara Prodi of Habitat.it


MIGUEL 
2025 | Roma
live performance, 30min


A procession that shifts between catwalk, ritual, and tableau vivant. An elf disrupts the runway, a bride bursts into the scene, and the group reorganises around each interruption. The performers drift away one by one, leaving a groom who arrives too late and falls asleep. A study of misalignment, timing, and the quiet choreography of arrivals and departures. 
CREDITS

Concept, direction and choreography: Alice De Crais 

Designers: Shun Giovanni Colafato, John Rey Tiva - Edoardo Pasini from PECORANERA, Desstructure, Federica Fusco

Performers: Gianluca Grifoni, Evaluna Pieroni, Marianna Di Majo Norante, Nicholas Zolo, Ilaria Malatesta, Shaven Nuyandoa, Benny Male, KA
Photography: Gaetano Zazzera


CON-TATTO 
2023 | London
Photographic Series


Born as a collaboration between Alice De Crais and Alice Lipizzi, these photographs describe the intrinsic bond between two people and their relationship that goes beyond the normative ideas of love. 

Through impulses and improvised movements, Alice and Shamil create narratives of fighting and reconciliation on the backdrop of changing nature. Their story follows a cycle of day and night where, as the light changes so does the intensity of their feelings. Their movement becomes the medium that allows their bodies to enter the primordial need of humans – being in contact with each other and the nature around us. This rite becomes the tool that brings back to the ancestral root of empathy and actively overcomes the universal fight against loneliness.

NASTY Magazine: https://www.nastymagazine.com/fashion/con-tatto-by-petar-petrov/  CREDITS

Art direction: Alice De Crais, Alice Lipizzi 

Photography: Petar Petrov 

Photography Assistant: Klaudija Avotina 

Stylist: Alice Lipizzi 

Styling Assistants: Francesco Candido, Lucy Broome 

Models: Alice De Crais, Shamil Redpath


La Stanza (Archivio 1519)
2022 | Roma
Installation


La Stanza (Archivio 1519) is a spatial installation grounded in an eight-year relationship that began in adolescence, unfolding through both romantic and non-romantic forms of intimacy. Conceived as a room one can physically enter, the work aims to recreate the hippocampus of the brain, the site where memories are formed, stored, and transformed. It offers access to a warm internal landscape that functions as a refuge and a mnemonic space.

Exploring nostalgia, early attachments, and the persistence of formative bonds, La Stanza (Archivio 1519) creates a protective environment in which personal and shared memories can surface, settle, and be experienced. 

SLEEVE MAGAZINE: https://sleeveshop.bigcartel.com/product/sleeve-issue-n-2-archive-obsession
CREDITS

Concept: Alice De Crais 

Artists: Alice De Crais, Paolo Alneon

Photography: Alice De Crais, Paolo Alneon, Tommaso D’Onofrio


If I Ever Get Around to Living
2022 | London
live performance directed by Ken Nakajima 


If I Ever Get Around to Living is the demonstration of the tribulation that comes with setting yourself free from the past. We can never truly move forwards if we cannot let go. The wall that is presented in front of the individuals has no reason to obstruct them, and yet, they obstruct themselves.
CREDITS

Direction, choreography, design: Ken Nakajima

Performers: Nefeli Kentoni, Pablo Temboury, Alice De Crais, Cornelis Joubert,  Mingxiang Wang, Gaïa Debuchy 

Documentation: Aurora Fantechi, Claire Suying Chevalier

Photography: Justin Atkins