During the German Nazi regime, numerous homosexual people were interned in concentration camps together with Jews, Rom, children and adults with disabilities, opponents of the regime, communist people. What distinguished homosexual people from other prisoners was, in the case of men, a pink triangle sewn onto the uniform at chest height; in the case of women, a black triangle. It is customary to refer to the extermination of homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps as the Homocaust. It is estimated that at least 50,000 homosexual people were interned in the concentration camps.
Since the early nineties, Lenz has given performative form to a Non Serena Art, confronting a definition of the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan that establishes the impossibility of the word after the drama of the Shoah, as a zeroing imposed by the paradigm of collective death.
The theme of the tragedies that occurred during the Nazi-fascist period appeared recurrently in Lenz's poetics, with various versions by Bruno Longhi (1991, 2005, 2015), and with Viale San Michele. Before the Cellars Whitewash (1990, 2021).
Since 2015, Lenz Foundation has made its historic multi-year dramaturgical research project permanent, continuing to annually produce a series of contemporary performative works, seminars and days of public reflection dedicated to the themes of the Resistance and European tragedy during the Nazi-fascist dictatorships and created in collaboration with ISREC Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age of Parma.
In the three-year period 2016-2018, Lenz's artistic investigation on the themes of the Resistance and the Holocaust developed with the creation of three installation-performative works:
2016 KINDER [Children]
On the tragedy of the Jewish children of Parma who were victims of Nazi extermination.
2017 AKTION T4
On the Nazi euthanasia program for the suppression of children born with malformations or disabled people.
2018 ROSE WINKEL [Pink Triangle]
On the deportation and extermination of homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps.
vantage.
Already in 1934 Lévinas wrote: «Hitler's philosophy is rudimentary. But the primordial powers that are consumed there explode the miserable phraseology under the pressure of an elementary force. They arouse the secret nostalgia of the German soul. Much more than contagion or madness, Hitlerism is an awakening of elementary feelings».
Rather than the free search for an elsewhere, a new rational world or a divine place for Western man and woman, Hitlerism has chained the truth to a community of blood, to an imaginary unity of race, which nails its members to an immobile condition.
The principle is biological identity: the ego, in Hitlerism, is thought of as coinciding and identical with the biological body, an essential bond of a community of blood, of biological bodies that identify and recognize themselves in a “us”. Moment, therefore, of glorification for some and damnation for others –primarily the Jews – who are also nailed to the biological identity that is attributed to them. Then all the others not belonging, or harmful, to the purity or growth of “us”. Biological identity, hereditary and somatic characteristics, then the body and the diversity between bodies become an element of domination of the destined race. The body of “us” takes on forms and identity characteristics.
Nazism does not conceive of the body as the body of the individual, but always referring to a collective entity, the Volk people understood in an ethnic-racial sense. It is the Volkskörper, the social body, the body of the Volksgemeinschaft nation, a national community that must have good health and be fortified, hardened by fatigue and suffering, to demonstrate racial superiority, but also to regenerate the race itself.
“Dein Körper gehöhrt dir nicht!” your body does not belong to you. Sport and physical activity is: Lebenskampf, fight for life.
Metaphor of the invincible soldier and personification of the perfect Aryan man, the Reich sports champion attracts all the expectations of a regime that needs the body of the athlete to exhibit proof of its biological superiority.
Except in cases where the athlete is Jewish, political enemy, gypsy or other and finally homosexual or, in the case of a female athlete, lesbian.
And’ always the body, the relationship between bodies and belonging to other categories of bodies, which makes the difference. Even if the athlete is a champion or a champion.
Among the thousands of tortured and persecuted bodies we have chosen one for everyone as a historical-dramaturgical refraction, Otto Peltzer, one of the greatest middle-distance runners in history. Arrested, imprisoned several times, then Mauthausen until May 5, 1945, when the Americans freed him. But Otto is not rehabilitated even in post-Nazi Germany. The “sin” of homosexuality will haunt him. He will go to India to teach athletics and other sports to young people, returning to Germany only at the end.
And today the finish line is not close either and the race continues.
As in lampdromia, torch running, the athlete/man/woman continues to pass the flame that brings the new sacred fire. In the shortest possible time and ever faster, to reach the goal of a new concept of relationship between men, of a new idea of community, of a new idea of freedom.
“Above the head the sky, under the feet the earth,/next to nothing./I feel someone from the side looking at us./I hear but I don't look, because I'm living,/running.”
Rosa Winkel's space is rhythmically divided by variable modular sequences made up of sixteen metal cabinets. The plastic volume of the small armarium contains the dual dimension inherent in undressing: unmasking, liberation from the external shell and at the same time denudation, understood as loss of identity, elimination of uniqueness and difference.
The multiplication of the compartments installed in the scenic space determines the oscillation between one aspect and the other, allowing to ‘figure’ the double dynamic on which the dramaturgy moves: the bodily fullness of the homosexual identity of the athlete and the dryness of identity of the body of the internee, deprived of any sexual sign, its absolute negation in the extermination camp. Only an escape, an endless race, to replace its affective and corporeal form.
The dramatic device bounces between the exaltation of physical feeling and its total subtraction operated in the concentration camps via castration, hormonal experiments and clinical treatments. The spatial scans of the metal containers, the opening and closing of these minimal archives of historical horror norm the scenic alternation between epic field and tragic field.
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Original text, imagoturgy | Francesco Pititto
Installation, direction | Maria Federica Maestri
Performer | Valentina Barbarini, Adriano Engelbrecht, Roberto Riseri, Giancarlo D'Antonio, Davide Rocchi
Music | Andrea Azzali
Curating | Elena Sorbi
Organization | Ilaria Stocchi
Communication and press office | Michele Pascarella
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio
Video media | Stefano Cacciani
In collaboration with ISREC
With the patronage of Arcigay Italian LGBTI+ Association
Production Lenz Fondazione
Matteo Bergamini
A show that at times is also charged with profound eroticism that goes hand in hand with Thanatos' darkness and which, in the darkness illuminated by powerful beacons pointed at one another as during an interrogation, allows one to rediscover one of the least told sides of that collective delirium that lasted years.
Giuseppe Distefano
Immersion is immediate. Sixteen metal cabinets placed in the center in two long mirrored rows leave a corridor in the middle, and, around it, a large space to allow us spectators to move freely to observe, listen, live inside the scene-lager and athletics field.
Francesca Ferrari
The three male performers, three athletes, before stripping off their gymnastic costumes go through and occupy the room, used in an itinerant way also by the public, to outline ideal race routes, draw relational geometries, modular with short and sudden running shots, and with the opening and closing of lockers (before memory and thought, containing objects, lights and microphones for secret words), the times, the forms, dynamics and connective tissue of the general composition, extremely supported by a sound and musical network of wagnerian inspiration.
Tommaso Chimenti
The scene is dazzling with the regent on the throne, Himmler, throwing, furiously frustrated, hundreds of toy soldiers onto the chest of the athlete who, inexorably, approaches him.
