Performative creation Maria Federica Maestri
Dramaturgical and visual composition Francesco Pititto
Performer Tiziana Cappella, Barbara Voghera, Carlotta Spaggiari, Valentina Barbarini, Victoria Vasquez Jurado (soprano)
Music Andrea Azzali
On 20 and 21 November, at 5.00 pm and 6.00 pm, in the Sala Steccata of Palazzo del Governor (Piazza Garibaldi, with entrance in via Mameli, 4), Distrazioni_Over Leonora Carrington, the new installation creation curated by Lenz Fondazione, will be presented.
It is a performative and visual composition by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto inspired by The Distractions of Dagoberto (1945), a masterpiece by Leonora Carrington, a radically multifaceted artist, among the most irreverent and visionary of the surrealist movement, to whom it is dedicated precisely in this period the first major solo exhibition in Italy at Palazzo Reale.
The action_installation is in continuity with the performative transcription work on the performances of Gina Pane – Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions – presented in 2024 also at the Governor's Palace, first paragraph of Over Beloved Female Artists – project that focuses on the thought and work of visual artists who have marked the aesthetic identity of Lenz and the history of modern and contemporary art – Leonora Carrington (2025), Marisa Merz (2026), Louise Bourgeois (2027).
The performative action is innervated dramaturgically by the third chapter of ‘Cartografie del Dis-‘ entitled ‘Movements of seasonal heterotopic distractions’, paraphilosophical writing by Orsola Rignani, professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Parma, with whom Lenz shares a complex three-year project on the themes of Posthumanism, a current of thought and privileged field of Rignani's research. The project “Post (-) human bodies 202five-six-seven. Representations, Visions, Reflections/Refractions, Narrations” was created by Rignani in collaboration with Lenz Fondazione and was selected for the two-year period 2025/2027 among the winning paths of the Fape Call of the University of Parma. It is part of Anatomie del Paesaggio, the project of poetic and performative repairs of the Urban Habitat and enhancement of the Museums of the University of Parma, the Athens of Bologna and the APE Museum of Parma.
The performers Tiziana Cappella, Nicole Dayanna Gonzales, Ivana Manferdelli, Agata Pelosi, Carlotta Spaggiari, Victoria Vasperiquez Jurado (soprano) together with the action writing of Orsola Rignani herself.
The installation was designed site-specific for the Sala Steccata of the Governor's Palace –an exhibition space facing the walls of the basilica of Santa Maria della Steccata – triggering a powerful mirroring with the frescoes by Parmigianino present in the presbytery's arch, frescoes that portray Three wise virgins and three foolish virgins in surprising symmetry with the female figures protagonists of Leonora Carrington's work.
The six virgins of Parmigianino, whose interest in alchemy –another analogy with Carrington's sensibility – obsessed the last part of life, penetrate Leonora's oblique, tender and cruel world, transfiguring a double pictorial universe into the psychic_body of the performers and literary.
In the bare space of the hall float the plastic bodies of six kayaks, milky cradles for the performers suspended between the inconsistency of reality and the desire of the unknown, bearers of disturbing beauties and restless souls.
_Who's distracted?
The inexperienced of the world?
The sick girl at the beginning, the goat to be slaughtered, the little girl on Easter Monday, the one found inside the broken egg?
The chocolate cream puff eater – without icing that she doesn't like.
Not her in person, far from the galleys of the performance, but her in them, but them in her, like riding them full of joy with purple bridles.
They are her – human matter – in it – her cries, her whims, her spasms.
And so they are tinged with the pallors of the welcome misfortunes that they together are: a genetic exception resistant to evil since they were born in evil or destined for it.
Born wrong cannot make mistakes, this is what makes them infallible unconsciousness.
Tickets 10€
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