Orthographe de la physionomie en mouvement

In a small group we sit inside a camera, a big camera obscura. The pictures – diffuse and strangely remote – shine as if from within when they fall through a small aperture into the deep darkness. Reversed and upside-down. The actual performance takes place outside the box, we only see the projected image.

The Italian artist group Orthographe (largely unknown until they stole the show at the Venice Biennale with their performance installation) base their fragile scenes and images on photographs by Jean-Martin Charcot, the famous founder of modern neurology at the Salpetrière hospital in Paris: In the 1870s, Charcot had used his epileptic and hysterical patients as actors for his theatrical demonstrations, in which he propounded his theories of hypnosis and hysteria. Lectures that were performances in their own right – and images that went down not only in art and film history, but also in collective cultural memory.

And Orthographe’s images stem as if from some distant memory, vague recollection: from a place beyond words, a place of indefinite and yet almost tangible presence of a performance that can only be sensed. A poetic, voyeuristic story without narrative, a flare-up of repressed images. We are witness to something, to which we are not really witness. Accompanied by distant noises from outside. Breathing, movement, uncanny and unreal, to the slightly delayed images right in front of us on the screen.

Regie: Alessandro Panzavolta
Bühnenbild, Ausstattung, Raumgestaltung: Alessandro Panzavolta
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Amati Francesca
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Sonia Brunelli
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Angela Longo
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Sabrina Maggiori
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Alessandro Panzavolta
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Valentina Parmigiani
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Roberta Galassini
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Sara Masotti
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Orthographe