“I’m looking for a mingled form of perturbing confusion between body and space, interior and exterior… I’m seeking a jolting of current time, between political cataclysms and triteness of the quiet life… I put a hotel room on the stage, aseptic and comforting, pink, bright, with a cut, a missing wall… and there on that threshold, between set and life, I question myself about the necessity of theatre”

Room, closed room / open place, empty: vacancy.

A space to be lived in, which contains but does not restrain, which becomes only the absent receiver of wandering or vacant existences, in any case travelling, … with that smell which trains leave on your hands. Neither myths nor heroes, people there, lying on the bed, maybe the same bed someone died on just days ago, decided to put an end to his life there, between these comforting walls, or maybe made love or felt lonesome…

There is no one story but many different and bizarre stories… real, invented, lifted from films or literature, yet all enclosed and recounted in a hotel room… set there, inside, with the noises from the floor above, the muffled sound of traffic from the street and the neighbours arguing…

Micro-pieces.

Portraits of varied humanity and violent real life, without excluding squalor and vileness, without excluding even moments of slight, infinitesimal poetry.

Microcosms.

Moments for monologues before the mirror or random dialogues with a roommate, with the other being you are forced to share the space with… on the phone or with reception… or with one who is about to arrive…

Infinite possible probabilistic variations.

Room as set, place of cinematographic fiction which, precisely due to the twofold connotation, lives a new form of reality, violent, where existence and objectivity overflow the categories of “true-false” and all the components are interchanged, like the space/time coordinates, in a play of interlocks and destabilising relationships…

Room as a section of script, where cinema and literature converge, collide and merge. In this claustrophobic space human micro-relations explode, attempts at dialogue from the later Pinter and Sarah Kane… obsessive thoughts evaporate, in the first person, excursions through the pages of Don DeLillo and Breat Easton Ellis: minimalism and dissent, also disgust.

“Coming here you adapt to a determined behaviour, – said Mink.

– What? – Room behaviour. The distinguishing feature of a room is that you are in it. Nobody should enter if he hasn’t understood this… entering a room means adapting to a certain kind of behaviour.”

Don DeLillo White Noise

So there’s no story; its dynamics can be reconstructed only by trying to stitch up the fragments, the clues left in the field, armed with the same meticulousness employed by Ellroy… Or by listening to the purely literary description of the facts, listed in detail with precision by a voice off. Exercise in inventive mathematics, since “the characters” living in the room no longer correspond to those of the texts and the novels drawn on for their construction… strange… (êtrange)… assembly.

– And you believe these stories are true?

– No.

– So why do you put them about?

– To give me tone, obviously.

– A taste for the extreme.

– A taste for the extreme. For the thrill. The existential fury.

Underworld, Don DeLillo