From Priam begging for mercy kneeling at Achilles' feet to George Floyd lying face down on a sidewalk suffocated by the pressure of the police officer Derek Chauvin's knee on his neck, a single universe of violence and suffering.
The new performative action places the human body at the center and focuses on the position of the loser, the defeated, the victim who begs for mercy before the executioner - a condition horribly recurring in the war epic; getting down on one's knees is also the position of gratitude, of the body that wants to remain in contact with the bottom, the root, the invisible, the dark, the unknown and at the same time tend upwards, the air, the other by himself, spherical, luminous, vibrant, sensitive.
L’Iliade non riuscirebbe tuttavia ad assurgere a poesia,
sarebbe solo un monotono paesaggio desertificato dalla forza,
se in essa non vi fossero disseminati qua e là momenti luminosi, momenti brevi e divini nei quali gli uomini hanno un’anima.
Simone Weil
The long-standing dramaturgical and imagoturgical investigation into this founding work of Western thought is directed in search of these luminous moments.
Truth and beauty, between divine figures and heroes in perpetual struggle, seem to mark time brackets where time seems not to exist, or to be as infinite and immortal as the lives of quarrelsome and vengeful gods. Parenthesis where poetry rises above the ferocity of a war whose meaning has been lost, the ultimate goal of contention.
Truth and beauty of figures that emerge above battle, victory or defeat, honor and glory, of the hero whose powerful humanity emerges above all in the weakness of a weeping or the embrace of blood brothers as night falls, of the role imposed on the prisoners of the defeated city or in the implored pity of those who ask for the unburied body of their son. But then the war resumes even more violently, and victory is achieved through deception.
For Simon Weil, the Trojan War is the paradigm of every war; Homer was able to recount its Evil and the inability of evil to contaminate good, the constant struggle between force and bestiality, the hero's solitude and piety, because only in these interludes of mortal beings do one awaken one's soul and thought from the dark night of a ten-year war. The poem contains within itself all the elements that will give rise to the Tragedy in its most complex and accomplished forms.
Every ethical-aesthetic reference to our present requires a critical, dramatic thought that draws the boundaries between epic thought, heroic figure and form, between strength and power in the field in order to draw its true meaning: does one who has strength also have power? or is the true power of those who do not recognize force and violence, after having suffered them, as inescapable?
A theatre that has its own contests in contemporary times cannot ignore it, poetry - a terrible weapon of defense - cannot ignore it.
Installazione site-specific
Aula Giorgio Canuto, Ex Istituto di Medicina Legale
Ospedale Maggiore
Università di Parma
Dramaturgy, imagoturgy_Francesco Pititto
Performance composition, installation, costumes_Maria Federica Maestri
Performer_Tiziana Cappella, Francesca Grisenti, Grugher, Lorenza Guerrini, Aldo Rendina, Sandra Soncini, Carlotta Spaggiari
Curatring Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Communication, press office Giovanna Pavesi
Graphic design, promotion Alessandro Conti
Light design Maria Federica Maestri, Alice Scartapacchio
Technical set-up Alice Scartapacchio
Production manager Giulia Mangini
Production Lenz Fondazione
Premiere June 4, 2026
"The great Priam entered unseen, and standing beside him he clasped in his hands
Achilles' knees, he kissed that terrible, murderous hand, which many sons killed him."
«What do you want?» Floyd responded: «Please, the knee in my neck,
I can't breathe, sir».
Strength is what makes anyone who is subjected to it a thing.
The performance space of the second chapter of the dramaturgical project inspired by the Iliad is a classroom within the Department of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Parma within one of the historic pavilions of the Ospedale Maggiore.
The Aula Canuto is presented in the form of an anatomical amphitheatre with concentric wooden steps in the centre of which the human body will be studied and evaluated by the spectator/observer.
The architecture of the classroom demonstrates the triumph of the gaze as a new privileged means of accessing knowledge of the body subjected to violence in the tragic epic of war, and we learn about the expertise in assessing personal harm in the fields of criminal, civil, social insurance, and private liability.
The identifying space for the outcome of the violence perpetrated and suffered by the victims becomes, through artistic installation, the place where the perpetrators can be tried and the victims can be repaired, displaying the violated bodies, providing evidence, testimonies, and documents.
The real hero, the real subject, the center of the Iliad, is strength. The force used by men, the force that bends men, the force before which the flesh of men retracts.
The human soul appears to you continually modified by its relations with force: overwhelmed, blinded by the force it believes it has at its disposal, it curves under the imperium of the force it suffers.
Those who had dreamed that strength, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, wanted to see a document in this poem; those who know how to discern strength, today as in the past, at the center of every human history, find there the most beautiful, the purest of mirrors.
Strength is what makes anyone who is subjected to it a thing. When it is exercised to the end, it makes man a thing in the most literal sense of the word, since it transforms him into a corpse. There was someone, and a moment later there is no one. And a picture that the Iliad never tires of presenting to us. The force that kills is a summary, gross form of force.
The more varied in its proceedings, the more surprising in its effects the other force, the one that does not kill, that is, the one that does not kill yet! She will surely kill, or perhaps kill, that is, she is merely suspended over the creature she can kill at any moment; in any case, she turns man to stone. From the power to transform a man into what by causing him to die, proceeds another power, and much more prodigious: that of changing into what a man who remains alive. It is alive, it has a soul; it is, nevertheless, a thing. Strange thing a thing that has a soul; strange state for the soul. Who knows what effort it takes for her at every moment to conform to this, to twist and fold in on herself? The soul is not made to inhabit a thing; when it is forced into it, there is nothing left in it that does not suffer violence.
A helpless, naked man on whom a weapon is pointed becomes a corpse before being touched. For a moment he thinks, acts, hopes:
He thought, motionless. The other, lost, approaches,
anxious to touch his knees. He wanted, in his heart,
escape evil death, black destiny...
And with one arm he grips his knees, supplicantly,
with the other he holds the sharp spear, without leaving it...
But he soon senses that the weapon will not deviate from him, and while he is still breathing, it is no longer matter; even if he is still a thinking being, he can no longer think anything:
Thus spoke that son of Priam, so bright, in supplicant sayings.
And he heard an inflexible word:
He said; the other was missing his knees and his heart;
he leaves the rod and falls sitting down, his hands outstretched,
the two hands. Achilles draws his sharp sword,
hits the clavicle, borders the neck, and whole
dips the blade into two cuts. He, face down, lies
stretched out and black blood flows, humectating the earth.
When, outside of any battle, a weak and unarmed stranger pleads with a warrior, he is not necessarily condemned to die; but a moment's impatience on the warrior's part would be enough to take his life. This is enough for its flesh to lose the main property of living flesh. A piece of living flesh reveals life especially in the gasp: a frog's foot, under the electric shock, gasps; the near appearance or contact of a horrible or terrifying thing causes any bundle of flesh, nerves, and muscles to gasp. Only such a supplicant man does not shudder, does not tremble; he no longer has the chance; his lips will touch the object which for him is the most charged with horror:
The great Priam was not seen entering. He stopped,
he clenched Achilles' knees, kissed his hands
terrible, murderous, who had massacred him
many children...
The spectacle of a man reduced to this degree of misfortune chills roughly like the sight of a corpse:
Like when hard misfortune strikes a man who to his country
he has killed, and he finally arrives at the abode
of some rich man and a shiver grips whoever sees him,
so Achilles fretted when he saw the divine Priam.
And the others also shivered, looking at each other.
But it's only a moment; immediately after the unfortunate man's presence, he is forgotten:
He said. The other, thinking of his father, longed to mourn him.
Grabbing him in the arm, he pushed the old man a little.
Both remembered: the one Hector, slayer of men
and melted in tears at Achilles' feet, face to the ground;
but Achilles mourned his father, and at times Patroclus too;
and their sobs filled the dwelling.
It is certainly not out of insensitivity that Achilles, with a gesture, pushed the old man to the ground, tied to his knees; Priam's words, making him remember his old father, moved him to tears. Simply, he feels free to move and move, as if instead of a supplicant it were an object touching his knees. The human beings who come to be around us have, thanks to their presence alone, a power (which belongs only to them) to arrest, repress, modify each of the movements that our body sketches; a passerby deviates our path along a road in a way other than that of a sign; when we are alone we do not get up, we do not walk, we are not in a room in the same way as when there is a visitor. But this indefinable influence of human presence is not exercised by those men whom a movement of impatience can deprive of life before even a thought has had time to condemn them to death. Before these men the others move as if they did not exist; and they in turn, in the danger of being reduced to nothingness in an instant, imitate nothingness. Pushed, they fall; fallen, they remain on the ground until chance makes the thought of raising them pass in someone's spirit. However, let them not believe, after being raised and honored with cordial words, that they take this resurrection seriously, that they dare to express a wish; an irritated voice would immediately silence them:
He said, and the old man trembled and obeyed.
The supplicants at least, once fulfilled, become men again like the others. But there are still other more unfortunate beings who, without dying, have become things throughout their lives. In their days there is no space, no emptiness, no free field for anything to proceed from them. These are not men who live harder than others, socially placed lower than others; they are another human species, a compromise between man and the corpse. That a human being can be a thing is logically a contradiction; but, when the impossible has become reality, the contradiction becomes torment in the soul. This thing aspires every moment to be a man, a woman, and at no moment does it succeed. And a death that stretches, stretches throughout the course of a life; a life that death chilled long before it suppressed.
So mercilessly does force crush, so mercilessly does it intoxicate anyone who possesses it or believes he possesses it. Nobody really owns it. In the Iliad, men are not divided into vanquished, slaves, supplicants on the one hand, victors and leaders on the other; not a single man is found there who at a certain moment is not forced to bend under the force.
