From November 5 to 17, 2024, in Genoa, the festival Testimonianze ricerca azioni will take place, promoted by Teatro Akropolis, which we must consider one of the main multidisciplinary events in Italy. The fifteenth edition is a renewed opportunity to take stock with Clemente Tafuri (artistic director of the festival along with David Beronio) on representation and its boundaries, on tradition and its betrayal, on the form of imagination and its limits.
Silvia Battaglio, “La sposa blu”. Ph. Roberta Savian
Simone Azzoni: An anniversary always carries the risk of historicizing, of freezing things. What is the baggage with which to face the boundaries of the future?
Clemente Tafuri: An anniversary should be an opportunity to change things. To focus on missteps and understand how and with whom to continue moving forward. The risk of freezing things exists every day. We often hear that we live in an era where everything lasts less and less, where things are evaluated with an increasingly fleeting sense of time. Paradoxically, we historicize everything in a flash and archive it with the same speed, without any critical awareness. It’s a process so fast and out of control that the process itself replaces the contents and things. It’s like a landscape seen from a car in motion. Everything is blurred and has apparent shapes. It all seems the same, and in the end, it becomes just that. The baggage to carry forward, perhaps, is the ability to look beyond the moment, beyond trends, beyond what is defined as current. Not to forget it, but to pass through it, sensing its meaning, provided it has one.
Why do you do it? Peter Brook would always ask. Why do you do it? What is the visible impact on the territory, the tangible presence of your action on the reference community?
Theater, like all art, has nothing educational in it if by educational we mean good manners and a life regulated by common sense. Art offers us the possibility of accessing the dark, mysterious, hidden parts of ourselves and the world. It’s a unique opportunity to understand a little better what surrounds us, what’s happening. An artist lives with this awareness, and it’s certainly not something comfortable. A work is always an enigma to traverse, and anyone approaching this complexity must have the tools to do so. Who would think of doing any job without having even the minimum skills? An idiot. A reckless person. But the community should not be educated by art. Not directly, not through the work. Therefore, a theater has the duty to design its activities in relation to the approach to the work. In this sense, a theater defines itself as a place of culture and as a space dedicated to art. These are structurally connected but never overlapping activities. And this is the reason why at Teatro Akropolis, right from the start, we have not only programmed performances but also conferences, seminars, workshops, editorial projects, and residency projects.
Alessandra Cristiani, “Caduta la neve”. Ph. Bertolotti
Performative, action, interrogation of the crisis of representation. To stand out from the many festivals, one needs to reaffirm an identity that is, however, a mobile response to the times. What changes, and what must remain Akropolis?
Everything is always changing. But the same urgencies, the same questions, the same problems we have always faced remain. Of course, with new projects and new trajectories. Imagining new ways to approach these issues with more coherence, radicality, and depth, as you rightly pointed out. Identity is something that is defined along a path, it doesn’t exist in an absolute sense. And it is therefore always in dialogue and in relation to what happens. Identity is structured, evolves, and transforms.
What is the dialogic contemporaneity of a myth?
A myth is outside of history, yet it crosses each historical moment with unprecedented power. It’s the great theme of origins that inexorably resurfaces. Every civilization is founded on the myths it has developed, we could say discovered. But it’s not an archaeological matter. Each of us is an expression of myth. In this sense, knowledge is only in the past, in the continual evocation of origins that manifest in every action. Theater is a great opportunity to sense this presence, provided it doesn’t reduce everything to a trivial tale or use the myth as a pretext to talk about one’s own concerns.
EM+ | Emanuele Rosa & Maria Focaraccio, “AMƏN”. Ph. Luca Donatiello
Production and market. What are the compromises not to make?
What is the reason an artist conceives and creates a work? It’s a simple question, and it’s worth asking. The answer is the compromise you’re referring to. If the work is the result of a confrontation with the desire to convey a message, the compromise to accept is the language, the word, the form, with all the ethical implications that entails. If the confrontation is with the work’s marketability and its affirmation, the compromise is with the market and the audience’s taste. Ultimately, a work is always a compromise because it’s a concrete action. But a show, the staging, is one thing, while research is another. I mean that research should never compromise. It cannot be inspired by the needs of the audience, by algorithms, or worse, by economic issues. Serious and rigorous research should be a prerequisite to avoid embarrassing situations on stage. It should, not necessarily, but it should.
Draw us a map. Where do you see trajectories to follow in the European scene?
For years now, we have witnessed a sort of return to order. As if the entire 20th century had not existed. The debate on the great philosophical theme of representation, the need for a new critique, the relationship between art, culture, and community. It all seems forgotten or resolved with simplistic reasoning, most of the time inspired by transient issues that last only for a season. There is no trajectory. There are artists and scholars who continue to work seriously. And this happens in the various forms in which theater manifests itself. There’s no school, no genre, no movement, no discipline, no geographical location.
Yuko Kaseki, Megumi Eda, “DIVINE”. Courtesy Teatro Akropolis
A few words on your latest project…
The film on Carmelo Bene that we are presenting in this edition of the festival, I believe, focuses quite precisely on what we’ve been discussing. It’s the latest chapter of La Parte Maledetta, Teatro Akropolis’ film project, and it deals with Carmelo Bene’s work from a philosophical perspective, highlighting the paradox of art: it’s inevitable incompleteness compared to life and any process of creation. It’s the limit of representation in a Schopenhauerian sense. All of Bene’s work is inspired by this, and I think it’s quite important not to stop reflecting on this problem, which is clearly one of the central issues of art and theater.
Info:
Testimonianze ricerca azioni
Teatro Akropolis
Via Mario Boeddu 10, 16153 Genova
5/11/24 – 17/11/24
teatroakropolis.com
He is an art critic and professor of Contemporary Art History at IUSVE. He also teaches Critical Image Reading at the Palladio Institute of Design in Verona and Contemporary Art at the Master of Publishing at the University of Verona. He has curated several contemporary art exhibitions in unconventional places. He is the artistic director of the Grenze Photography Festival. He is a theater critic for national magazines and newspapers. He organizes research and experimentation theatrical events. Among the recent publications Frame – Videoarte e dintorni for the University Library, Lo Sguardo della Gallina for Lazy Dog Editions and for Mimemsis Smagliature in 2018 and 2021 for the same publishing house, Theater and photography.
NO COMMENT