The act of seeing. A selection of extracts

Program #3 of To Reverse One's Eyes, a retrospective of
Romeo Castellucci's work, curated for the festival by Piersandra Di Matteo, presented by Piersandra Di Matteo

Hey girl! (Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2006)
Inferno (Cour d’Honneur, Papal Palace, Avignon, 2008)
Sul Concetto di volto nel Figlio di Dio (Theater der Welt, Essen, 2010)
The Phenomenon called I (Tokyo Festival, Yumenoshima, 2011)
Le Sacre du Printemps (Ruhrtriennale, Duisburg, 2014)

This program is made up of extracts from different creations by Romeo Castellucci.

Hey girl! (2006), pivots around the truth of the body of the actress Silvia Costa: gestures and images condense the exteriority of a state of consciousness between dream and wakefulness. Nominated as associated artist of the Avignon Festival 2008, Romeo Castellucci staged Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, a trilogy freely inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The Cour d’Honneur of the Papal Palace hosted Inferno, in which the artist, choosing to “be Dante”, takes upon himself the sense of confusion involved in finding oneself at the outset of a voyage through what it is to be human. In Sul Concetto di volto nel Figlio di Dio (2010), framed between an enormous Salvator Mundi by Antonello da Messina and the spectator, a hyperbolic amount of excrement is produced by an old and incontinent father, lovingly cared for by his son: degradation of the body is turned into a sublime reflection on mankind and transience. The Phenomenon Called I (2011) was conceived en plein air for the park of the artificial island Yumenoshima (Island of Dreams), made out of urban waste and found in the bay of Tokyo, in front of an audience of approximately 3,000 people, roughly six months following the disastrous tsunami that struck the country. Le Sacre du Printemps (2014) is a choreography for 40 machines in which the molecular dance of 30 tonnes of animal bone dust, industrially produced as agricultural fertilizer, nebulized into gaseous masses, embodies the idea of dance, composing a rhythmic score that is closely related to the static ostinatos and the dynamic accents of Igor Stravinskij’s music.