commissioned by Short Theatre
Key visual and visual identity design for Short Theatre, an international performing arts festival held in Rome from September 5 to 14, 2025, marking its 20th edition.
Pencils on paper, digital manipulation
Every image is a slow re-chewing of what has already been impulsively produced, posted, shared, archived, or forgotten by someone else.
We live in the most image-saturated moment in history, and the images in this work do not claim to be new — and who knows whether we will ever truly be able to produce new ones again.
Their re-staging adds nothing; rather, it proposes a recomposed overcrowding of a common experience: scrolling alone through an infinite feed and being overwhelmed by it.
It is a landscape thick with unresolved presences: afflicted emojis, fires, holograms, desires waiting to be fulfilled, memories of lost screenshots, warnings of justice, desperate attempts to grasp a zeitgeist.
It neither represents nor asserts: it is an infestation.
It does not seek synthesis, it lets certain invisible connections emerge on their own. This work has been built over time, through concealment, revelation, and accumulation, in the effort to hold onto an intuition, in the same way one tries to remember what remains at the end of an endless scroll.
“In 2025 Short Theatre invents another space, besides the stage, to host the work of Noura Tafeche, visual artist, onomaturge and independent researcher.
Noura Tafeche is working on an iconosphere that emerges from a dialogue with the festival, starting with shared words and desires, which ST25 takes as its own visual statement.
A table full of presences from the digital and material world, taken from the web and drawn by hand, is emerging, which will gradually be revealed” City of Rome official press
Alongside the visual identity, Tafeche presented a lecture performance as part of the festival programme, expanding the graphic project into a live, discursive format.
The text of the lecture performance was later published by Nero Editions IMMAGINI CHE FANNO AMMALARE.
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