There is one, a bird, which renews itself,
and reproduces from itself.
Smoking my life I die.
Burning my head I’ll be born again.
Please cry for me Father.
They say that, from the father’s body,
a young phoenix is reborn,
destined to live the same number of years.
Performer Valentina Barbarini follows the legendary path of the Phoenix, the sacred bird that, at the age of five hundred, lays its limbs in a nest of incense and cinnamon, built atop a palm tree, and then dies. From his body will then be born another Phoenix that will transport his nest to the temple of Hyperion, the Titan father of the Sun God.
The metamorphosis of Phoenix, the mythical bird that is born of itself, takes place in an anti-monumental space, between silent eggs – large transparent eggs– that hatch to welcome the dying body of the little Phoenix into an ash wash. Enclosed in a bob made of dozens of cigarette butts, Phoenix begins to live again so he can die again.
In an installation system with strong visual and sonic power, some very short children's textual segments –the farewell to the father, the fear of death, the shyness of birth – manifest micro emotional traces totally devoid of eloquence and dramatic rhetoric.
Then, it is said, a baby phoenix is reborn from the paternal body, which is destined to live as many years. And when age has given him the strength to bear the toil, he frees the branches on the top of the plant from the weight of the nest, religiously takes with him the cradle, the tomb of his father, and, having reached the city of Hyperion on the breath of air, before the sacred gates of his time he lays it down.
