The graphomaniac

Screenplay and Choreography | Rosa Mundi

La graphomane

ἰδὲ γὰρ ἀνθρώπους οἷον ἐν καταγείῳ οἰκήσει σπηλαιώδει, ἀναπεπταμένην πρὸς τὸ φῶς τὴν εἴσοδον ἐχούσῃ μακρὰν παρὰ πᾶν τὸ σπήλαιον, ἐν ταύτῃ ἐκ παίδων ὄντας ἐν δεσμοῖς καὶ τὰ σκέλη καὶ τοὺς αὐχένας, ὥστε μένειν τε αὐτοὺς εἴς τε τὸ πρόσθεν μόνον ὁρᾶν, κύκλῳ δὲ τὰς κεφαλὰς ὑπὸ τοῦ δεσμοῦ ἀδυνάτους περιάγειν, φῶς δὲ αὐτοῖς πυρὸς ἄνωθεν καὶ πόρρωθεν καόμενον ὄπισθεν αὐτῶν, μεταξὺ δὲ τοῦ πυρὸς καὶ τῶν δεσμωτῶν ἐπάνω ὁδόν, παρ᾽ ἣν ἰδὲ τειχίον παρῳκοδομημένον, ὥσπερ τοῖς θαυματοποιοῖς πρὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων πρόκειται τὰ παραφράγματα, ὑπὲρ ὧν τὰ θαύματα δεικνύασιν (La Repubblica di Platone VII 514 a – b)

Biennale del Sale | Pietralia Soprana – Sicily 2017

Screenplay and Choreography | Rosa Mundi

The performance tells of four prisoners tied one by one, so that they cannot turn around, sitting on the ground at the bottom of a cave. Outside the cave there is the world that moves and rumors. Music composed by Mario Bajardi in the background. The echo and rumble of the world enters the cave, modifying its human perception. Behind them, behind the cave wall, there is an intense fire, a real and imaginary projection of the prisoners generated by their shadows united to the real world. One of the prisoners incessantly writes letters in a notebook and gradually crunches them up and throws them on the ground.The texts of the letters are in French and are taken from the novel by the Belgian psychotherapist Sophie Buyse, published in 1995 by L’Ether Vague Patrice Thierry.The well-known psychotherapist wrote the numerous letters that make up her novel on the occasion of a scientific internship that led in 1990 within the walls of the historic psychiatric institute of the island of San Clemente in Venice, now transformed into a luxury hotel.

The four prisoners embody the genres of being attributable to Plato’s work, in binomial, that is, to the sensible and the intelligible.

Shadows are the reflection of our imagination, our fears, our nightmares and fears.The installation of Rosa Mundi represents life and its becoming in cyclic ritual infinite real birth and death and vice versa.The wall and the projections on it represent the frontier between the unreal imaginary nourished by the human mind, the barrier and the prison of our soul.Letters, unilateral correspondence correspond to the passage and metamorphosis of immaterial ideas into written material words.Salt and fire represent the passage, the liberating act that allows the prisoner, freed and released from the group, to pass from sensitive to intelligible knowledge. The rite of salt and fire sanction the liberating act of our thought which gets rid of fears and negativity and looks at the truth without any fear.Overcoming the fear of the glow of the light and his blinding the gaze of the man imprisoned and used to living exclusively in his imagination, one of the prisoners defeats his fear, gets rid of the chains, gets up, takes the crumpled letters on the ground of the Graphomane and throws them on the fire with salt.The released prisoner approaches the projection of the fire and takes the salt darkened by the flames with the scorched paper and throws it on the installation of Rosa Mundi that lights up, revealing the strength of true knowledge, the good and the beauty of the ideas free from the median ones of pure imagination, based essentially on the senses and not on knowledge.

Mario Bajardi’s music composed with Rosa Mundi for the performance “La Graphomane” is a succession of sounds of the imaginary thoughts of the prisoners, the swiping of the pen on the writing paper, the flames of the reflected fire, the sound of salt on the brazier, the sound shaman of true knowledge interpreted by Iris Pattyn, some words taken from Plato’s Republic and from the psychological novel by Sophie Buyse La Graphomane.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *