Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella—recipients of the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement at the 2018 Venice Biennale—return to the stage with their new creation: a visionary journey that, amid surreal irony and cruel humor, confronts the constant risk of the abyss and the illusion of possible salvation, exploring the essence of humanity through the paradoxical epic of a transforming pentagon-spaceship, an admiral, and a crew adrift.
At the center of the stage, an admiral dressed in electric blue attempts to save his ship, while the crew surrounding him is blinded by market logic and individual interests. No one is to blame, yet the gulf between their ways of being in the world is unbridgeable.
“A mutiny is always desirable in a healthy organism,” read the director’s notes, “and here, amid divergent visions, yet another exile unfolds—not the migration of a people, but the inexorable drifting away from one’s own will. And they all lived as wrecks and wonders. […] Returning to the natural and wild dimension is impossible. We are living through a new prehistory in which the human condition is humiliated, confused, and inadequate. In the virtual space made tangible, an eco-pentagon provokes the void; invisible figures flank the egocentric edifice: they are not ghosts but inductive stimuli, and, despite everything, reality is never uniform; it always disrupts preestablished programs and feeds the function of the imagination in unpredictable ways. Technological cruelty permeates the living being. It is the disappearance of the hero.”