EXTATICUS – 1 Tebaide
EXTATICUS – 2 Magna Peccatrix
EXTATICUS – 3 Mulier Samaritana
EXTATICUS – 4 Maria Egiziaca
EXTATICUS – 5 Penitente
A Faustian-themed installation divided into five sequences halfway between visual arts and actor performance. Extaticus contains a series of five performative events between art and theater created by Maria Federica Maestri, which take their name from the same number of visions of female figures that accompany Faust at the moment of his death.
The death of Faust is the central theme of Extaticus, a death that reaches the conclusion of Goethe's capital work (1832) and is placed temporally a short distance from the real death of the author who for over sixty years had dedicated himself to the writing of his masterpiece: “Everything that remains of my life from now on, I can consider a gift; it is unimportant whether I will write anything more or not”, says Goethe after giving birth to the last pages of Faust.
It is tradition to think that in the instant before death one sees the images that have composed one's life flow before one another: in the moment of the transition from corporeality to spiritual life Faust is accompanied by five visions of female figures that help him to reach a regenerated, higher form of existence. They are figures that Goethe takes from the Christian tradition (Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, Maria Egiziaca); among them, for the regeneration of Faust, Margherita, now called “A Penitent”, plays a fundamental role, thanks to her ancient act of sacrificial love.
Extaticus is the name given by Goethe to one of the Fathers of the Church, intermediaries between man and God, who appear to Faust in his progressive ascension towards the high spheres. Pater Extaticus reveals the four states of eternal love: “voluptuous fire, scorching knot of love, burning pain in the heart, divine intoxication overflowing” . In the five sequences that make up the installation, Faust's path towards achieving the spiritual state will therefore be accomplished.
Not a merely visual event, nor a properly theatrical format therefore, rather a broader frame that contains both, a sort of aesthetic action, a poetics of ecstasy capable of containing within itself the body of the actor and that of the spectator in an instantaneous time and in a liminal space, the threshold that divides existence from its representation.
The use of Extaticus installations takes place for only one viewer at a time.
