Monica Barone

In the center of the scenic area, suspended between the metal branches of mechanical plants, the antlers of the doe sacrificed in place of Iphigenia stand out, the day the father – Agamemnon – to propitiate the departure of the ships towards Troy, he had decided to slaughter his daughter.

On the bottom, also hanging from a metal tripod, a column broken into two sections, memory and omen of the ruin of the father's house; a chain of violent deaths has in fact bloodied the Atrides lineage: Clytemnestra, mother of Iphigenia, to avenge her daughter's death she killed her husband, his son Orestes killed his mother to avenge his father's death, driven mad by the Furies, he wanders desperately in search of his own conscience. In atonement for the crime, driven by Apollo he will land in Tauris with his friend Pylades to steal the statue of Diana kept in the sanctuary and bring it back to Greece to pacify the gods.

From the place of sacred functions to the place of intimate life. To the side in Iphigenia's room a record player plays Gluck's opera of the same name – Iphigenia in Tauride – in a version recorded on vinyl recorded in the sixties. The change of the disc marks the original narrative path and the poetic time of Iphigenia's life.

On a small altar, a cold steel cutting board, a lavatory is placed to perform purification rituals: on that altar Iphigenia, disobeying laws that he deems unjust and inhumane, he will not sacrifice any victim, he will not make any human sacrifice, but with an intimate and secret ritual she will beg the gods to return free and to be happy. Faced with their silence, confused and distressed, Iphigenia decides to dare a bold action and conquer a new homeland-body free from social and religious constraints.

Biographical notes

Lenz Foundation | Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto
Lenz's artistic history is an incessant one, continuous investigative work on contemporary language. In the first phase of their creative journey, Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto explored the key dramaturgy of Western culture, retranscribing its poetic impulses into contemporary actions. In a more recent phase, artists have placed visual and plastic research at the center of their poetics. The performative action is wedged between writing for images and the plastic creation of space, which no longer has the functional limits of the scene but tends to be a real art installation. The density of performative work is symmetrical to the intensity, exceptionality, uniqueness of the interpreters, not just actors, but artistic reagents of the creative text. They also remain in this recent phase, references to monumental dramaturgical nuclei, but they are used as grammatical and not syntactic devices, they do not underlie the form of the composition.

Büchner, Hölderlin, Lenz, Kleist, Rilke, Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, Grimm, Andersen, Calderón de la Barca, Genet, Lorca, Bacchini, Ovidio, Virgilio, Manzoni, d'Annunzio, Ariosto, Dante, Euripides, Aeschylus, Verdi, Gluck: these are the authors who have marked Lenz's monographic and multi-year projects, from 1985. The recent contemporary performative creation projects are the artistic result of in-depth visual research, filmic, space, dramaturgical and sound.

In an aesthetic convergence between exegetical fidelity to the word of the text, visual radicality of film creation, originality and conceptual extremism of the artistic installation, Lenz's work rewrites the philosophical tensions and aesthetic anxieties of contemporaneity in visionary signs.

Translation, dramaturgical rewriting, imagoturgy of the works are by Francesco Pititto, who directs it together with Maria Federica Maestri. The scenic installations and costumes are created by Maria Federica Maestri, noted by critics for her work of "dramaturgy of matter", for the system of visual signs that constitute his very personal "design-acted".

Iphigenia in the Taurides
I am mute (I'm mute)

Since Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Christoph Willibald Gluck

Text and imagery | Francesco Pititto
Installation, regia, costumes | Maria Federica Masters
Interpreter | Monica Barone
Choreographic notations | David Rocchi

Treatment | Elena Sorbi
Organization | Ilaria Stocchi
Press office, communication | Elisa Barbieri
Diffusion, promotion | Alessandro Conti
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio
Media video | Doruntina Film
Assistant | Giulia Mangini

Production | Lenz Foundation

with the patronage of Goethe-Institut Mailand

Duration | 45 minutes

trailer:

whole wheat:

site-specific version at the Villetta Monumental Cemetery in Parma:

With a vigorous look, Maestri and Pititto trace a geography of absolute passions in a single interpreter, not determinable in a historical time, restoring its ritual dimension to an essential dance of gestures. (more)

Giuseppe Distefano, Exibart

.

If the energy of the actor, and of the actor-shaman, it has to do with non-everyday psychophysical states, here we have the epiphany of bodies that spontaneously embody that energy and are therefore able to theatrically shake the spectator with the pure force of their presence alone, naturally disciplined and modeled on stage by the relationship with director Maria Federica Maestri. (more)

Franco Acquaviva, Curtain

The viewer is welcomed by a minimalist scenography based on a suggestive conceptual and visual synecdoche that creates a hybrid setting between dream and obsession. The horns of the doe sacrificed in place of the woman swing like a warning attached to a thin mechanical stand and the temple of Artemis is also evoked by two columns suspended from a similar mechanism. In a corner, a mysterious altar stands out, dominated by a transparent basin, sacred premonition of the post-modern ritual that will be carried out in the following ones 45 minutes. (more)

Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine

The dancer Monica Barone, whose singularity in diversity is capable of becoming a metaphor for the singularity that establishes our existence of Heideggerianly marked paths in the forest, faces the recovery of oneself in places that have seen the fracture and caesura with the world. It's a return to a new world but that, inside her, it has always existed, unaware perhaps, has always knocked on the conscience. A path that makes her a companion, more than guide, because his steps, overlapping, become ours. (more)

Maria Dolores Pesce, dramma.it

The Iphigenia of Lenz Foundation has a quality that can perhaps be defined as “metaphysical”. The transformations of women do not take place with the real and concrete means of word or action. Iphigenia always transforms herself by sinking into an image and embodying the vision on her sensitive body, which thus suddenly becomes poetic and free. (more)

Enrico Piergiacomi, University of Trento

La prima performance interamente scritta e diretta da Monica Barone apre riflessioni sulle forme comparate di conoscenza, l’epistemologia del nostro tempo, sul primato riconosciuto alla scienza e sulla visione meccanicistica del corpo.

Il punto di partenza è la figura del sub-umano suggerita dal romanzo fantascientifico di Philip K. Dick But androids dream of electric sheep? (1982). Una forma di sottuomo inumano sepolto da una materia residuale di vite obsolete. L’inumano ha capacità non comuni, oggi disattivate dalle istituzioni. L’inumano è alla deriva all’interno di un colonialismo disumano. Human Inhuman Posthuman – Sensitive Geophilosophies vuole scardinare l’abitudine sociale di guardare alla disabilità attraverso il modello medico, mostrando la volontà di riscattare la sua natura umana.

«Perseguo il risveglio delle intelligenze profonde e connaturali, forme di conoscenza intuitiva, in modo da superare il pensiero binario antagonista e sperimentare un ampliamento degli orizzonti culturali. La possibilità di un umano a tutto tondo può essere raggiunta attraverso un’arte che produce nuove istanze e nuovi territori da esplorare.» M. Barone

Allegedly, Inhuman, Posthuman
Sensitive Geophilosophies

Creation | Monica Barone

Performer | Valentina Barbarini, Monica Barone, Davide Tagliavini

Production | Lenz Fondazione _ Natura Dèi Teatri Festival

Treatment | Elena Sorbi
Organization | Ilaria Stocchi
Press office, communication | Elisa Barbieri
Diffusion, graphic care, training | Alessandro Conti
Technical care | Alice Scartapacchio
Assistente alla produzione | Giulia Mangini

Production | Lenz Foundation

Being able to be directly inspired by one of the reference artists of your creative path is both an aesthetic trap and a conceptual refuge. I won't try to stay balanced, well balanced between the parts, ma oscillerò in ‘partition’, divisa tra la memoria dolorosa delle sue ferite – il terrorismo sentimentale di Gina Pane – e la poesia del sacro forza generatrice di gioia delle sue ultime opere. To fall and get up we will be multiple bodies, exorcists and adventurers of our underwater world. The scene dedicated to Gina Pane is not the canvas on which to paint the wound in dark colors, but the living space in which to erect the monument to the body not tamed nor subjected to the profitable functioning of the discriminating ableism of our time.

Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions is a performative creation in which the bitter and harsh beauty pursued by Gina Pane in her irreducible artistic practice, takes the embodied and disturbing form of the four performers: injured bodies, bodies of the disaster, martyr bodies, holy bodies that survived the nothingness of pain. In close poetic and formal concatenation with the radicality of Gina Pane, this new iconostasis by Lenz becomes an affective and poetic reflection of the extreme actions of the wound artist, 'without lulling ourselves in his memory, but trying to be reborn in the oxidized drops of his bloody footsteps'.

Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions takes place at the center of the images-Observations, made during the performance of 1973 by Gina Pane which took place at the Diagramma gallery in Milan, entitled "Sentimental Action", in which the artist's actions metaphorized female pain as an expression of love for humanity and Nature.

Il simbolismo religioso del corpo lacerato come dono e della ferita come moltiplicazione della capacità sensoriale sono elementi di grande potere germinativo nella formazione e nella pratica artistica di Maestri, whose 4 Sentimental Actions return as the fruit of inspiration, in a non-radial echo, ma multiforme.

In a creative process of a-hierarchical association and dissociation between psychological and formal propositions, composed of mixtures and simultaneity, symmetries and synergies with the work of Gina Pane, Maria Federica Maestri traspone l’azione sentimentale originale in azione di ribellione, mettendo in dialogo, in questa prima performance, l’iconografia sacra del ‘Martirio di Sant’Apollonia’ sublime miniatura di Jean Fouquet (tratta dal ‘Libro d’Ore d’Etienne Chevalier’, compiuta tra il 1452 and the 1461) con il cortocircuito creato dalla corporeità slapstick di Buster Keaton, muto ‘Capro espiatorio’ (‘The Goat’ titolo di un suo film del 1921) e agnello sacrificale per antonomasia, figura mitica della storia cinema.
The symmetry between Gina Pane's research on the body of saints, characteristic of the last phase of the 'Partition' (works inspired by Saint Francis, San Lorenzo, Saint Peter, Saint martin, Saint John) and the martyr-body of the four performers returns to the present, in a conceptual flip button, in a process of identity transposition – Saint Apollonia, Santa Dinfna, Sant’Agata, Saint Mary of Egypt – la fisica reale delle ferite. Gina Pane's installation rereading of the saints is transmuted, in the iconostasis of Maestri in performative revival, 'Painful way' (title of a work by Gina Pane del 1988) da percorrere ‘qui e ora’ per ricongiungersi attraverso la verità delle proprie lesioni poetiche ed esistenziali al pensiero estetico e politico dell’artista.

In Action n.1 the active presence – the performer Monica Barone – establishes an 'unequivocal' correspondence with the sacred iconography, an authentic reflection with the figure of Apollonia (the saint whose teeth are pulled out), in absolute coincidence with the personal martyrdom suffered. Through the performative act recalled and practiced by the performer, the wounded body is transmuted into a healed body, set free, resurrected in the loving gesture of self-giving to the world in a new political evidence.
For Baron, the meeting with Gina Pane is a return to an epiphanic moment, in which the artist was active above all in the visual field: that 2000 in which the gallery owner Luciano Inga-Pin, tenacious supporter of Gina Pane, he curated a solo exhibition of Monica Barone at Contemporary Art in Milan.

With this work inspired by Gina Pane my research contains and investigates pain from a certain perspective: that of care, both as an instrument of social control, both as an expression of self-determination. Drawing on my own medical history, I chose, in particular, to develop the performative action around the insertion of the nasogastric tube, as the reversal of a maneuver undergone in a ritual gesture, aesthetic and poetic, in reversing the violence of forced feeding into an awareness and power. The use of this medical device, which at the same time is a crossroads where autobiographical memories and universal symbolic meanings converge, represents the possibility of going beyond pain, as a point of arrival or intent, to carry out an act of re-appropriation of a feeling of body-psyche unity.

Articolazione della s-Partizione n.1

The parchment of which the miniature is made materializes in shape and size the wooden table on which the saint is tied while she is martyred - her teeth are pulled out with pincers.
The whiteness of Apollonia's dress transfuses onto the new paper table.
Behind, against the wall, is a large mirror the length of the panel in which the spectators are reflected in symmetry with the figures in the background of the miniature.

The tongs and a glass of milk are placed by Neosanta on a small glass cube. The cube offers metaphors of spatial reality: the void is confined within its six walls, it is ordered and bent to human measurements as in a unitarian temple where the tools are prepared, the tools and equipment necessary for the desired diet.

Destruction of the possibility of chewing.
Mythography of the orifice and visual compensation:
il bendaggio_mentoniera è memoria di martirio
e simulacro di perenne riparazione della ferita.

+ Action reloaded
+ Sentimental action
+ Rebellion action
+ Slapstick action
+ Self-nourishing action

Elements of the first Sentimental Action inspired by Saint Apollonia: the mastery of pain, the pertinacity of martyrdom, proud arrogance, the voluptuousness of extremes, the delirium of ecstasy, the mockery of the executioner.

Over Gina Pane
Azione sentimentale n.1

Creazione_Monica Barone, Maria Federica Masters
Ideation, installazione_Maria Federica Maestri
Performer in co-creazione_Monica Barone
Rifrazioni visive_Francesco Pititto
Cura progettuale e organizzativa_Elena Sorbi, Ilaria Stocchi
Cura allestitiva_Alice Scartapacchio, Giulia Mangini
Communication, ufficio stampa_Elisa Barbieri
Diffusion, graphic care, formazione_Alessandro Conti
Assistenti_Tiziana Cappella, Mattia Goldin
Documentazione fotografica_Elisa Morabito
Produzione_Lenz Fondazione

Project created in collaboration with:
Department of Culture of the Municipality of Parma and Solares Foundation of the Arts
Un ringraziamento particolare a Simona Tosini Pizzetti curatrice della mostra
'Contemporary. Masterpieces from private collections in Parma’