Monica Barone
MONICA BARONE
Visual artist, dancer, choreographer
His practice starts from research on sacred themes, of esotericism, of the ontology, of speciesism and antispeciesism and on the processes of phylogenesis. His dance tends to focus on the "person" considered in his physical-mental-emotional-energetic totality and on the connatural intelligences of the body, aiming for authenticity of the movement's codes, and overcome the idea of assimilating and adapting one's body to codified dance languages (from “compliant” bodies). The dynamics of his dance comes from research on the body's internal proprioception in space and time, in relation to the outside, using dance languages such as contact improvisation and dance theatre.
Dancer with a "non-conforming" body, with a physical disability that has a strong impact on the cultural and operational realities of entertainment, it totally questions the working and training practices of dance. These practices are consolidated in the ableist society, they are to be considered disabling practices because they still insist on criteria that make the disabled body appear like a cumbersome exception, forgetting that art is not static, but rather an ongoing and increasingly diversified cultural process.
✩ Iphigenia in the Taurides
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
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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
✩ HUMAN INHUMAN POSTHUMAN
The first performance entirely written and directed by Monica Barone opens reflections on comparative forms of knowledge, the epistemology of our time, on the primacy recognized to science and on the mechanistic vision of the body.
The starting point is the figure of the sub-human suggested by the science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick But androids dream of electric sheep? (1982). A form of inhuman subhuman buried by a residual matter of obsolete lives. The inhuman has uncommon abilities, today deactivated by the institutions. The inhuman is adrift within an inhuman colonialism. Human Inhuman Posthuman – Sensitive Geophilosophies wants to undermine the social habit of looking at disability through the medical model, showing the will to redeem his human nature.
«I pursue the awakening of profound and connatural intelligences, forms of intuitive knowledge, in order to overcome antagonistic binary thinking and experience a broadening of cultural horizons. The possibility of a well-rounded human can be achieved through an art that produces new instances and new territories to explore.» M. Barone
Allegedly, Inhuman, Posthuman
Sensitive Geophilosophies
Creation | Monica Barone
Performer | Valentina Barbarini, Monica Barone, Davide Tagliavini
Production | Lenz Foundation _ 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
Production assistant | Giulia Mangini
Production | Lenz Foundation
✩ OVER GINA PANE
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’, divided between the painful memory of her wounds - the sentimental terrorism of Gina Pane - and the poetry of the sacred, joy-generating force of her latest works. 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.
The religious symbolism of the torn body as a gift and of the wound as a multiplication of sensorial capacity are elements of great germinative power in the training and artistic practice of 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 transposes the original sentimental action into an action of rebellion, putting into dialogue, in this first performance, the sacred iconography of Jean Fouquet’s sublime miniature ‘Martyrdom of St. Apollonia’ (tratta dal ‘Libro d’Ore d’Etienne Chevalier’, accomplished between 1452 and the 1461) with the short circuit created by Buster Keaton's slapstick corporeality, silent 'Scapegoat' ('The Goat' is the title of one of his films 1921) and sacrificial lamb par excellence, mythical figure in cinema history.
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 – the actual physics of wounds. 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) to be explored 'here and now' to reunite through the truth of one's own poetic and existential lesions with the aesthetic and political thought of the artist.
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.
Articulation of the s-Partition 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:
the chin bandage is a memory of martyrdom
and simulacrum of perpetual healing of the wound.
+ 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
Sentimental action n.1
Creazione_Monica Barone, Maria Federica Masters
Ideation, installation_Maria Federica Maestri
Performer in co-creation_Monica Barone
Visual refractions_Francesco Pititto
Planning and organizational care_Elena Sorbi, Ilaria Stocchi
Exhibition care_Alice Scartapacchio, Giulia Mangini
Communication, press office_Elisa Barbieri
Diffusion, graphic care, training_Alessandro Conti
Assistants_Tiziana Cappella, Mattia Goldin
Photographic documentation_Elisa Morabito
Production_Lenz Foundation
Project created in collaboration with:
Department of Culture of the Municipality of Parma and Solares Foundation of the Arts
Special thanks to Simona Tosini Pizzetti, curator of the exhibition
'Contemporary. Masterpieces from private collections in Parma’
