Atlas on Violence
After the four-year project on the Holy Scriptures, what happens in the world and what they have given us in terms of scriptures and images-imagination-imaginal, leads us towards an analysis of violence, the violent act, the mythical hero and war.
Atlas on Violence is the new multi-year project with anatomical work starting from the Iliad, the first great book of the West that poetically transcribes themes such as conflict, prevarication, violence, impiety and a series of performative rewritings connected with the epic of the Iliad.
Truth and beauty, between divine figures and heroes in constant struggle, seem to mark temporal parentheses where time seems not to exist, or to be infinite and immortal like the life of quarrelsome and vengeful gods. Parentheses where poetry rises above the ferocity of a war whose meaning has been lost, the ultimate goal of the dispute.
In order to investigate the profound relationship between matter and spirit, between nature and the human being, the thoughts and writings of Simone Weil and the thought-principle of ‘Overcoming loss’ come to our aid, as always, the fundamental outcome of the reflection on the tragic by Friedrich Hölderlin, tremendous and violent act is made in the painful exploration and definition of evil through the tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant and the lyric Mnemosyne.
Every ethical-aesthetic reference to our present requires a critical dramaturgical thought that draws the boundaries between epic thought, heroic figure and form, between strength and power in the field in order to draw the true meaning: who has the strength also has the power? Or is the true power of those who do not recognize force and violence, after having suffered them, as inevitable?
A theater that has its competition in the contemporary world cannot ignore it, poetry – a terrible weapon of defense – cannot ignore it.
Project Holderlin
In past years, Lenz Fondazione has dedicated a unique research path in Italy to the German poet, philosopher, romantic playwright, who died mad after almost forty years of living locked up in his tower house in Tübingen. From 1991 to 1994, Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto in fact edited the mise-en-site of almost all of Hölderlin's works, which were retranslated specifically for the stage: the three drafts of The Death of Empedocles, Oedipus the Tyrant, Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Hölderlin-Foscolo, The Age of Oaks.
Between 2014 and 2016 they concentrated their work on Hyperion, transcribing the short youth novel into three different scenic segments: Hyperion/Diotima, Hyperion #2, Hyperion.
The first staging of This Weak Force, a site-specific creation of the Choirs of Oedipus the Tyrant in the Archaeological Museum of the Pilotta monumental complex, dates back to 2017.
Translations from Sophocles are the last work that Holderlin saw printed.
The translation of Oedipus Rex, criticized and even mocked at the beginning of the 19th century, subsequently proved to be a work of very high poetry, on which Benjamin, Heidegger and Brecht wrote memorable pages.
THE MEANING OF TRAGEDIES
Friedrich Hölderlin
The simplest way to understand the meaning of tragedies is to start from paradox.
In fact, everything that is original, since each faculty is distributed equally and uniformly, does not indeed appear in its original strength, but instead properly in its weakness, so that the light of life and the phenomenon properly belong to the weakness of every totality.
Now, in the tragic the sign is in itself insignificant, ineffective, while precisely what is original emerges. The original can in fact properly appear only in its weakness: to the extent that the sign in itself, as insignificant, is placed = 0, what is original can then also be represented; the hidden foundation of all nature.
If nature is properly represented in its weakest endowment, then the sign is = 0 when it is represented in its strongest endowment.
