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Exilium The great scar

Is a visual poetic performance from Ovid's Tristia and Paul Celan's Todesfuge, created by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, music by Andrea Azzali, performed by Valentina Barbarini. In The Great Scar the verses of the Latin poet Ovid written from the land of exile in Tomi (present-day Constance) in Romania accompany the verses of the Romanian Jewish poet who lived in France, but he wrote in German – the language of his mother and the Shoah – his best-known work (‘death escape’) dedicated to the horror of the Nazi genocide and extended to all humanity in suffering.

Exilium_The great scar was part of the mapping of transmedia events dedicated to Celan's work carried out by the seven-year Paul Celan in Italy 2007/2014 project of the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies of the University “Sapienza” of Rome.

Introduzione

The pairing/comparison is constructed through a visual and material dramaturgy defined by two female figures, Sulamith – the Beloved of the Song of Songs and symbolic personification of the Jewish nation – with ash-colored hair, testimony to the Jewish identity burned in the extermination camps of Hitler's Greater Germany and Margrete – the Beloved of Goethe's Urfaust, a female literary symbol of the German nation – a woman with golden hair of the nineteenth-century humanist tradition. The visual identity of the performance is defined through an imagoturgy polarized on a large cylinder scenically drawn inside the interpreter's body, and is substantiated in an installation framework of domestic-metallic-anatomical forms which, welcoming the agonizing bodies of Sulamith and Margrete, materially reinforce the condition of violence and constraint to which the characters are forced: the bed and the chair, primary symbols of everyday life, they are transposed into metallic nightmares that dramatically guard the tragic fate of the two women. The large space of the construction site, wounded and healed by urban deconstruction, enters the performative dimension, testifying, through extreme visual interpenetration, to the devastating force of violence that brings everything back to a common space of suffering.

Sulamith's long ash hair –in search of her beloved and exposed to the same obscene and indiscriminate violence that is raging against the Jews – buries the interpreter in a dark material vortex punctuated by sound chimes intended as omens of death: in the slow annihilation of the bride in the hands of her jailers – engraved in an agony of bars into which she seems to fall – the final condemnation of an entire people is inscribed. Margrete's desperate plea, asking for mercy before the death sentence for the killing of her mother and newborn son –burdened with crosses nailed to her feet and stretched out on the metal bed of her cell–, reveals the unresolved nightmare of a nation that is the cradle and teacher of absolute evil. The tragic fate of the two women is linked to the exiled suffering of Ovid's poetic word –suggested by a sort of tragic epic placed at the edges of the scene – condemned by his own verses to forced removal from his own land. The ‘Black Milk’ (SchwarzeMilch) of Celan's Todesfuge, the primary symbol of the litany of violence to which prisoners are eternally nailed at every hour of the day, punctuates –as in a polyphonic musical ‘fugue’ – the final whisper of a teddy bear, an apocalyptic sign of childhood – the depersonalizing ‘us’ of the poet and the only possible voice after the drama of the extermination. The elimination imposed by the paradigm of collective death –the impossibility of the word defined after the tragedy of the Shoah – intersects with the song of valiant defeat of the poet and poetry, condemned forever to an immanent condition of shipwreck and oblivion.

Credits

from Ovid's Tristia, The Song of Songs, Goethe's Urfaust, Paul Celan's Todesfuge

creation | Maria Federica Maestri | Francesco Pititto

translation | imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto

installation | Maria Federica Maestri

interpreter | Valentina Barbarini

music | Andrea Azzali_Monophon

light design | Gianluca Bergamini | Alice Scartapacchio

achievements | Luca Melegari

production | Lenz Rifrazioni

duration | 40 minutes

Premiere | Parma, Lenz Teatro, ParmaPoesia Festival, June 21, 2009

Images

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Press

Krapp’s Last Post

Andrea Alfieri
Lenz's poems in exile Refractions

[...] Although creation allows little to avoid certain intelligibility problems, the alienating sense of oppression of the subject matter does not undermine the consequent idea of dehumanization that the visual installation injects into the soul of the performance.
While soundscapes and soundscapes effectively frame the scenic exposition in the anguished territories of confinement, the imagoturgy of the video backdrops seems to blur reality into a whirlwind escape that appears anything but liberating, swallowed up by the forms and horizons of a construction bent on maladjustment. Two distinct paths but both leading to the same human condition of suffering and oblivion.
As often happens in this kind of theatrical composition, it is the multiplicity of visions and interpretations that enrich the spectator's experience that is the measure of the success of the work.

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