After the four-year project on the Holy Scriptures, what happens in the world and what they have given us in terms of scriptures and images-imagination-imaginal, leads us towards an analysis of violence, the violent act, the mythical hero and war.
Atlas on Violence is the new multiyear project with anatomical work starting from the Iliad, the first great book of the West that poetically transcribes themes such as conflict, prevarication, violence, impiety and a series of performative rewritings connected with the epic of the Iliad.
To investigate the profound relationship between matter and spirit, between nature and the human being, the thoughts and writings of Simone Weil and the great founding poems of Western thought come to our aid, as always, while the philosophical reflections on power of Hannah Arendt will be fundamental to understand the moral and political gesture of aesthetic and ethical translation of ‘violent works’.
Parallel to this dramaturgical research and continuing the work begun in 2024 with Gina Pane, we will journey into the performative re-transcription of the works of three decisive and fundamental artists for our aesthetic vision: Leonora Carrington, Marisa Merz, whose 100th anniversary of birth, and the great Louise Bourgeois.
Atlas on Violence is the title of the three-year project 2025 › 2027 by Lenz Foundation and is structured starting from five positions | intentions | fundamental actions:
The many years of dramaturgical and imagoturgical investigation into this very foundational work of Western thought is directed towards the search for these luminous moments.
Truth and beauty, between divine figures and heroes in constant struggle, seem to mark temporal parentheses where time seems not to exist, or to be infinite and immortal like the life of quarrelsome and vengeful gods. Parentheses where poetry rises above the ferocity of a war whose meaning has been lost, the ultimate goal of the dispute.
Truth and beauty of figures that emerge above battle, victory or defeat, honor and glory, the hero whose powerful humanity emerges above all in the weakness of a cry or in the embrace of blood brothers as night falls, of the role imposed on the prisoners of the defeated city or in the implored pity of those who ask for the unburied body of their son.
For Simone Weil, the Trojan War is the paradigm of every war; Homer was able to tell of it Evil and the inability of evil to contaminate good, the continuous struggle between strength and bestiality, the loneliness of the hero and pity, because only in these parentheses of mortal beings do the soul and thought awaken from the dark night of a war that lasted ten years.
The poem contains within itself all the elements that will give rise to Tragedy in its most complex and complete forms.
Every ethical-aesthetic reference to our present requires a critical dramaturgical thought that draws the boundaries between epic thought, heroic figure and form, between strength and power in the field in order to draw the true meaning: who has the strength also has the power? Or is the true power of those who do not recognize force and violence, after having suffered them, as inevitable?
The Lenz Foundation theater season will take place from March to December 2025, composed of a plurality of performative, educational and didactic proposals, which open the post-industrial spaces of Lenz Teatro to public use and initiate dialogue with other cultural realities and monumental places of the city.
Historic headquarters of the formation since 1989, Lenz Teatro is located in via Pasubio, in Parma, in a former peripheral and popular neighborhood which has undergone intense urban redevelopment interventions over the last few years. Here the traces of an industrial past, of which isolated sections of important archaeological value survive, coexist with innovative contemporary architectural experiments in a typology of European-style urban redevelopment.
In addition to the creations of the project on the Iliad and the re-edition of This Weak Force, the resumption of the project on the Holy Scriptures, The Creation (special project commissioned by the MAECI Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation), Numbers, Apocalypse, Gnostic Apocalypses - the performative, installation, artistic, musical, visual, formative actions that will innervate the annual project will be different and multi-sign. Of particular note are the performative transcriptions inspired in 2025 by the works of Leonora Carrington.
Many dramaturgy investigated – backbones of the multi-year projects - Shakespeare, Manzoni, Jakob Lenz, Calderón de La Barca - in the resurgent shows, in the site-specific re-editions, and in the laboratory results, and the poetic repair project will also continue to bear artistic fruit conceived starting from an important collaboration with the environmentalist association LIPU, whose recently renovated national headquarters is in Parma located in the sector adjacent to Lenz Teatro; from this convergence Haiku was born, a performative fresco of poetic re-wilding for a lyrical-ecologist thought: Where before it was _ Bosco _ Acqua _ Aria _ Roccia, are a cycle of poetic performances widespread in the urban landscape, in museum spaces and in protected oases.
In the next three years, the permanent project on the Resistance entitled Branches and Radiation will have a new conceptual expansion, not limiting itself to the artistic translation of the historical memory of the Resistance, but broadening the performative transcriptions to the propulsions radiating the principles that give rise to the fight against Nazi-fascism.
New spatial declinations in the symbolic places of democracy and anti-fascism of the city of Parma.
The performative actions imagined by the artists associated in Parentela for ND'T 2.0 #2025 and the numerous outcomes of the training experiences will be presented to the public within the spaces of Lenz Teatro.
The intense live programming will be accompanied by a busy calendar of streaming events, dialogues with the public, seminars.
Project for poetic and performative repairs of the Urban Habitat and enhancement of the Museums of the University of Parma, the University of Bologna and the APE Museum of Parma.
The valorisation of the landscape and monumental heritage can be achieved through profoundly innovative performative experiences from a dual visual and installation point of view.
After the presentation and appreciation by IBC - Institute for Artistic, Cultural and Natural Heritage of the Emilia-Romagna Region of the Opera sull'Opera Project, Lenz Fondazione intends to plan actions to reactivate this heritage, through the creation of new maps and new routes in the use of museum assets.
Furthermore, our many installation and performance experiences in large monumental complexes of enormous historical-artistic value such as the Royal Palace of Colorno, the Pilotta, the Archaeological Museum of Parma, the Rocca di San Secondo, the former Ospedale Vecchio, the Guatelli Museum, the Temple of Valera, the former Prison of San Francesco, the Abbey of Valserena, the former Church of San Ludovico have revealed to the public new ways of using monumental spaces, in an aesthetic stratification/activation of the historical heritage through the signs of contemporary artistic languages.
We believe that innovative action within museums and historical spaces acts as a process of ‘restoration’ and reinvention of the imaginative power of the works contained in them, thanks to which it becomes possible to regenerate the Past/Present into an Imminent Past – citing the title of the great Lenz Foundation for Parma Italian Capital of Culture 2020+21 Project.
Since the early nineties, Lenz has given performative form to a Non Serena Art, confronting a definition by the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan that establishes the impossibility of the word after the drama of the Shoah, as a zeroing imposed by the paradigm of collective death.
The theme of the tragedies that occurred during the Nazi-fascist period appeared recurrently in Lenz's poetics, with various versions by Bruno Longhi (1991, 2005, 2015), and with Viale San Michele. Before the Cellars Whitewash (1990, 2021).
Since 2015, Lenz Foundation has made its historic multi-year dramaturgical research project permanent, continuing to annually produce a series of contemporary performative works, seminars and days of public reflection dedicated to the themes of the Resistance and European tragedy during the Nazi-fascist dictatorships and created in collaboration with ISREC Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age of Parma.
In the three-year period 2022-2024, Lenz's artistic investigation on the themes of the Resistance and the Holocaust focused on the role and biographies of the Partisan Women of the Parma Resistance and in particular was dedicated to the Little ones, the very young partisans, little more than teenagers during the years of the Resistance, of which historical research has managed to recover/preserve only slender documentary traces. In 2024 on the occasion of the April 25th Celebrations, Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto curated the site-specific macro-installation inside the Parma City Council Hall.
In the next three years, the permanent project on the Resistance entitled Branches and Radiation will have a new conceptual expansion, not limiting itself to the artistic translation of the historical memory of the Resistance, but broadening the performative transcriptions to the propulsions radiating the principles that give rise to the fight against Nazi-fascism. New spatial declinations in the symbolic places of democracy and anti-fascism of the city of Parma.
In a syntonic proceeding with the research and performance compositions on the Iliad and tragedies curated by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, the different reconnaissances on the theme of violence investigated by the philosopher Orsola Rignani, the dramaturg Lorenza Guerrini and the directors Alessandro Conti and Beatrice Baruffini, will have a multi-year persistence.
The thought-principle of the ‘Overcoming the loss’ fundamental outcome of the reflection on the tragic of Holderlin becomes a tremendous and violent act in the figures of wounded heroines and fallen heroes, Cassandra, Ajax, Penthesilea, Hecuba, and painful exploration in the definition of evil through the writings of Hannah Arendt.
But also the dis-obediences, the dis-tractions, the dis-solutions, the dis-saids that will constitute the research project on the potential charge of the dis-prefix will cause multiple reactions and stimulating conceptual mutations for the mapping of violence in our time.