Exilium

In the modern world, imposed exile has been joined by voluntary exile – exilium voluntarium – practiced for reasons of sustenance, escape from situations of war and ethnic persecution, and defense of one's life and that of one's family. Lenz Rifrazioni's exilium outlines a map of human and artistic representation of this suspended condition, this irremediable atopy; less evident forms of exile pertinent to a human geography confined to urban campity, in which subjects are exiled from beloved bodily locations and forced into intriguing environments: exilia in integers and exilia in exteriors can combine into a single non-existent existence signaled exclusively by being ex-habit and ex-habitat.

The visual system of the performance consists of a material habitat in which some domestic-metallic-anatomical forms in aluminium are installed, simulacra of a condition of violent everyday exile: a table with a book, a bed, a table with four chairs and a small boat – symbol of the journey and the many tragic epics by sea – surmounted by four serial screens that imagoturgically recount Ovid's Romanian exile. The unity of the space/habitat that accommodates the various performative actions reflects the unity of a calibrated existence –from birth to death – starting from an uninterrupted and immanent condition of exile and loss.

Bodily and intimate washing, a maximum exposure of the fragility of the body – linked to a dynamic of confinement and distance from one's own land – outlines a geography of exile of the body and the body constituted by a violent sharing of one's intimacy. The identity of the embryonic body encompasses the exile and separation of a new human life from its creator: through an exchange / comparison between mater and filia, the distressing material of a modeling work that generates definitive detachment is substantiated. The animals, monkeys and tigers without nature, exiled in a domestic interior built by human action, almost zeroed in their natural and wild movements, suffer from environmental inadaptability to the metal objects of the habitat, demonstrating the claustrophobic distance between natural and artificial.

In the incommunicability between two lovers, forced into exile by happiness and sex, the bodies' resignation to definitive defeat stands out, to alienation as an urban dynamic that structures social relationships, now deconstructed by the domestic solitudes of contemporary suburbs.

In exile from home, wooden models of chairs, beds, and wardrobes –contained in a suitcase full of objects– are structured as material icons of reference to recover the memories of their homeland, consumed by constant departures and forced to be contained in excessively confined spaces. The bed of old age, illness, and death welcomes the dying and tormented body into exile from life, forcing it to remain permanently fixed: the metal sheet covers the body like a shroud at the end of cancer therapy. In the anguished and tormented chant of a little girl playfully reciting a very intimate Polish nursery rhyme, the dramatic exile of the Jewish people appears violently, identifying the raped childhood as the absolute tragedy.

The metallic elements of the habitat, now forced into the agony of superposition and oblivion, are substantiated in a definitive deconstruction: placed one above the other, they lose their symbolic and creative power, ready to welcome the definitive departure and exile. In the final exile of the metal boat, filled with clothing and objects of identity, the plastic horror of the shipwreck of migrant bodies looms, in the lair of the waters they are forced to cross in flight from a land where they can no longer live.

Ovidian poetic traces –written during the Romanian exile – traverse the performative settings of the work, recited by the Romanian performers and young actresses and actors of Constance, providing a commentary in the form of letters, placed as dramaturgical elements that substantiate the condition of exile and atopy common to all living beings.