Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella – recipients of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2018 Venice Biennale – return to the stage with their new production: a visionary journey which, through surreal irony and cruel comedy, 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 spaceship-pentagon, an admiral and a crew adrift.

At the centre of the stage, an admiral dressed in electric blue attempts to save his ship, whilst the crew surrounding him is blinded by market logic and individual interests. No one is to blame, yet the gulf in their ways of being in the world proves irreconcilable.
“Mutiny is always desirable in a healthy organism,” read the director’s notes, “and here, amidst 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 a new prehistory in which the human task is humiliated, confused and inadequate. In the virtual space made of matter, 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 pre-established plans and feeds the function of the imagination in unpredictable ways. Technological cruelty permeates the living being. It is the disappearance of the hero.”