Permanent dramaturgical research on the themes of the Resistance and the Holocaust gave rise to AKTION T4, an original text by Francesco Pititto on the Nazi euthanasia program for children with disabilities and genetic malformations.
Since the early nineties, Lenz has given performative form to a Non Serena Art, confronting a definition of 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 Rami e Radiazioni 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 Aktion T4: Tiergartenstrasse program is the street of the Berlin Zoological Garden. Number 4 was inhabited by Karl Brant, a doctor, and Viktor Brack, his assistant, who had been tasked with building an organization capable of eliminating all the mentally ill, all carriers of incurable diseases, and all children born with malformations and hereditary tares. Adolf Hitler had the order issued on September 1°, 1939. The aim was to make the Aryan race increasingly pure and to prevent contamination derived inter alia from serious mental illness.
Tiergartenstrasse 4 became the headquarters of Operation T4. In short, the operation consisted of just three simple phases: sending a form to psychiatric hospitals and asking who the patients with the least working capacity were, proceeding with the transfer of the patients to intermediate sorting centers, and then sending them to elimination centers where the patients were quickly taken to gas chambers and then cremated. It had to be done in the utmost secrecy.
As always in that regime, the propaganda machine was immediately set in motion. All the media of the time were activated: films and theatrical performances were made whose plot was always the same: a family discovered that they had a mentally ill member inside them and after having suffered so much suffering both –the family and the patient–, it was decided to entrust it to an organization that, through charity, proceeded to eliminate it. The T4 machine for the physical elimination of the mentally ill and disabled was operational in January 1940, initially with few cases, then slowly the numbers began to become more consistent: around 1300 per month per nursing home. The citizens of Hadamar, a place where an elimination center was located, realized with certainty that the nauseating stench invading the city was the result of the cremation of the sick, and so it happened that the families refused to hand over their sick relatives, and eventually the two Catholic and Protestant churches also began to make their voices heard. The Gestapo did some research and found that there was very high aversion to the T4 program among the population, so the program was suspended.
Original text and imagoturgy Francesco Pititto
Installation and direction by Maria Federica Maestri
Music Andrea Azzali
Performer Alessia Dell'Imperio, Giacomo Rastelli, Tommaso Sementa, Carlotta Spaggiari, Barbara Voghera
Voice over Marco Musso
Production Lenz Fondazione
In collaboration with ISREC
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