The voices of Bruno Longhi's sisters, recorded by Francesco Pititto in 1990, come to life in the present in a new visual and sound installation dedicated to one of the central figures of Parma's partisan resistance.
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 voices of Bruno Longhi's sisters, recorded by Francesco Pititto in 1990, come to life in the present in a new visual and sound installation dedicated to one of the central figures of Parma's partisan resistance.
Bruno Longhi is a key figure of the anti-fascist resistance movement in Parma.
Tortured and murdered by the SS stationed in Parma, his body, searched in vain by his brother Giovanni, from Parma to Bolzano, was never found.
The text, written in 1991, was born from the testimonies of family members – the sisters Maria and Giacomina, and of the companions of Bruno Longhi, certainly one of the most representative personalities of the Parma Resistance. From the dense story of the sisters we derive multiple pictures of the life of Bruno Longhi, of his “European” personality, from his interest in literature, music, cinema, and the study of languages, including German, “the language of the enemy”.
Scenic creation transfers, in a contemporary vision, all its intellectual vitality and human sensitivity. The documentation was collected in collaboration with the Historical Institute of the Resistance of Parma.
A piece of Italian history that resonates echoes of unburied bodies as old as the theater and is refracted in a present that struggles to remember only until a few decades ago.
The time of history appears more distant than it really is.
1945-2025, just eight decades for a tragedy identical to that of a few millennia ago:
Antigone and the competition never concluded it between power and nature, between the justice of men and divine justice.
Thirty years after the first staging, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the Liberation, Lenz Fondazione is committed to a rearrangement of the work by translating the story of Bruno Longhi and his sisters through images and sounds.
THE COLD BODY OF MEMORY
ICE
PHOTOGRAPHIC REPRODUCTIONS OF THE LONGHI FAMILY
PRINTED PAPER
BLACK VELVET
AUDIO RECORDINGS
HEADPHONES
Memory is the dissolution of the past.
Memory is a cold body that must be warmed.
Memory is a physical sensation that lives again in the hands.
Memory is the sound of absent people becoming an intimate presence, a whisper in the ears.
Memory is the moist sigh of those present, their tears, their smiles.
Memory is the silent trace of wet soles on the floor
in a darkroom.
Memory is an act of gratitude and gratitude.
Original text and imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto
Installation and composition | Maria Federica Masters
Sound drawing | Andrea Azzali
Curatorship | Elena Sorbi
Organization | Ilaria Stocchi
Communication and press office | Giovanna Pavesi
Graphic design and promotion | Alessandro Conti
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio, Dino Todoverto
Production assistant | Giulia Mangini
Photographic documentation | Elisa Morabito
Lenz Production Foundation in collaboration with ISREC Historical Institute of Resisitance and the Contemporary Age of Parma
and the support of La Giovane S.c.p.a.
