Art not serene
Many images are produced during the journeys of Memory, but what is documented? How far can you go beyond documentation? If the documentation, from an aesthetic point of view, remains almost identical (mostly photographic and audiovisual media) and confined within the confines of the historical story, even if elaborated by writing poems or impressions, over time the memory becomes “frozen” in a rigid formal structure, what remains of the labor and extermination camps remains building, rail, gate, barbed wire and each resonates with destroyed humanity but remains the image of what is, of what was; while measuring oneself with the production of new images, of new expressive forms, up to the boundaries of what historical, ethical interpretation and artistic creation allow us, would bring the historical document – be it monumental, architectural, photographic or paper – to renew itself in its function of dissemination and presence in contemporary times, to bring about transformations that diminish the temporal distance, the memory, the crystal-image of the past and the present would merge into a single figure, which is memory but also the life of today. When there are no survivors left to remind the world of what has been, the new generations will have to tell it again to the next to keep alive the memory and the modality of the new story, so that History does not stray too far, it will have to find the most effective means to make it reach the heart and mind of each one again, so that it becomes our history. Because unfortunately, the images and reality of the present continually provide us with direct references to what has already happened.
KINDER's dramaturgy contains several parts of this History: the list of labor and extermination camps, a mother's letters to “Mr. Quaestor of the Province of Parma”, anonymous poems by Jewish children from the camps, imaginary dialogues between the children of Parma with two other children from the camps, Tereszka and Papo, a retranslated version of Paul Celan's “Tenebrae” but the dramatic core remains the singing. And here is the presence/resurrection of the children of the Children's Choir, becoming a performative essence together with a single actress, a reflection and refraction of six truncated lives, through their silent gazes and then reciting and intoning voices a single Mozart/Overbeck Lied “Komm lieber Mai_” which speaks of an imminent May, of violets, of games in the night and snow, of a beloved free country.
Around and within, the electronic landscape of a musical dramaturgy composed of foreign voices, reworked noises made up of sound references to the Camp, musical movements aimed at creating new spatio-temporal dynamics.
KINDER searches for an Echo of what could no longer be said, listened to, written, never forgotten, of an art that is not serene. Paradoxically, he attempts to “play the silence” that the deaths of six Jewish children, along with those of millions of human beings, would impose on reason; but Adorno, after his long-distance dialogue with Celan on the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, later wrote: “Incessant pain has as much right to express itself as the martyred one to scream. Therefore perhaps it is false to have said that after Auschwitz one can no longer write a poem […] Art that is no longer possible at all if not reflected, that is, taken except as a problem, must by itself renounce serenity. And first of all, it is forced by the most recent events, the saying that after Auschwitz one can no longer write poetry has no absolute validity, but it is certain that after Auschwitz, since it was and remains possible for an unpredictable time, one can no longer imagine a serene art”.
