Lead grey

Already the inspiration for the creation Aeneis in Italy, a 2012 work by Lenz inspired by the Virgilian epic that reread the events of the Aeneid in a metahistorical key, Pasolini's visions are the driving force behind poetic explorations that find in the criticism of power and violence in its different forms and expressions, the founding conceptual device for an installation, musical, visual and performative re-edition entitled Grigio lead. In continuity with the previous scenic project, the creation takes as its body of investigation the celebratory rhetoric of the Virgilian epic in a critical interpretation of the iconology of the potentate and dominance.

The dramaturgical structure of Grigio lead, the title of one of the six paragraphs that made up Aeneis in Italy, stratifies original portions of the poem, fragments of historical documents from the ‘years of lead’, diffracted segments from the 120 days of Sodom by De Sade, to translate the story narrated in the second part of the Aeneid - from the seventh to the twelfth Book - on a metahistorical level. A project born from the poetic persistence of Aeneis and Aeneis in Italy, a cycle of twelve performative and visual paragraphs inspired by Virgil's poem, composed between 2011 and 2012 by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, and musically drawn by Andrea Azzali, Lillevan, Paul Wirkus, Ovo.

The arrival in Italy of Aeneas seems to mark the beginning of a tragic epos that remains constant in Italian history: a war without heroes, a violence without a subject, a human architecture that is mute and incapable of feeling. Thus in a metahistorical vision of the original conflict, the occupation of Lazio by the pius Aeneas and the rebellion of the young Turnus disobedient to the new order, are transfigured in a time just gone by, the mournful night of the Seventies.

No ceremony of remembrance, no father to hate, no lover to abandon, no mother to desire, no past and no future, just one ‘this side’ bloodied by the rhetoric of conflict, only the anonymous, cruel and pathos-free present.

The renunciation of piety erases the faces of ‘boys and girls’ in arms, deprives them of their names, family affections, of the future, because the promise of resurrection – after the universal judgment of the clash with the State – appears to be a petrifying rhetoric more powerful than daily peace. Like the doe mortally wounded by Ascanius on the banks of the Tiber, the identityless generation of the Years of Lead pierced by the disappointment of post-Resistance revisionism runs wildly in the fight against power.

Only the mangled body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, like a princess destined for sacrifice, a tearful Lavinia dirty with the mud of those same shores on which history began millennia ago, overcomes the horror of oblivion and leaves with its poetic and prophetic groan, an eternal sign of pity and beauty.

In the visual installation, a contemporary iconostasis composed of large red doors, a memory of the places of death of Aldo Moro and Pier Paolo Pasolini, chases images of human bodies reduced to gaunt and mutilated torsos, old gods speechless in the face of the massacre that is about to take place, portraits of young fighters sacrificed on the altar of armed struggle, teeming with blood fruits, a wolf-woman encysted by multiplied animal breasts torn apart by the mouths of adult males close to power, and terrified deer trying to escape the fatal blow.