Let the sunshine in
Turning back and choosing Antigone in order to look at youth, once more in the long journey around the letter X (Ics) which denies and signs, which becomes crossbreed/crossing of old and new, memory and present … but also refusal of a here and now that’s beginning to “stink of death”. We proceed in a fragmentary way, full of blanks: and how else could it be when faced with this name that dazzles and distances? We might appeal to Hölderlin, thinking of a sisterly being in common and sharing – with the many young people we meet at the workshops – hypothetical representations of a brilliant Antigone of today. She’s an eminently political figure who, in these years of embarrassing conservatisms and feeble position-taking, we like to set once more beneath the “light of the sun”. We proceed by reconstructing traces, clues, fragments left on the terrain, following a progression that is wholly exposed to the events of our time: this openness to the immediate has triggered a process that is subverting Motus’s representative modes themselves, towards an increasingly worn-out aesthetic zeroing.
Syrma Antigónes, Antigone’s trace – title of the total project – is the ancient name of a site close to Thebes, where it seems that Polynices’ death took place: the focus of exploration converges precisely on this killing which we dedicate to the many young people who have died in riot struck streets. Everywhere.
LET THE SUNSHINE IN is the first contest conceived for the “officine grandi riparazione” in Turin, which we readapt to open spaces, in any case empty and unadorned.
Silvia and Benno in the total solitude of the couple, from time to time become (Antigone and Polynices), (Eteocles and Polynices), (Ismene and Antigone): sibling characters willfully set in brackets like mythopoeic pretexts. Polynices – pacifist or terrorist depending on the interpretation – embodies the idea of brotherhood itself, but also the very ambivalence of the various exegeses.
The highly powerful, self-destructive bond between two siblings/actors who seek a representation which is impossible to implement, which crumbles in its attempt at verisimilitude, where the tragic figures are “used” in accordance with a personal combinatorial process, a political-polycentric rewrite, almost Beckettian…
In attempting to reassemble these remains, we ran into the death of the 15-year-old anarchist Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot dead on 6th December 2008 by a stray bullet fired by a police officer… a new Polynices? We will soon be training our eyes on that district, going straight to the scene to collect voices and images… but this is only a part of future developments…
The spectator, put at the centre of the scene, bombarded with our own questions, unavoidably becomes an actor in a performance which anarchically overflows the stage, escaping theatre to get dirty with the uncertainties and poverty of everyday life, on the street with a tireless Antigone whom we like to imagine armed with joy.
©Valentina Bianchi
©Valentina Bianchi
©Valentina Bianchi
©Marcello Corno
©Marcello Corno
©Marcello Corno
