Photos by Olivia Guardi
White Mal
Selected for the European e-MIX network's Qualitylabel
A Zaches Theatre production
In collaboration with Regione Toscana - Progetto Filigrane, University of Arezzo, Centro Il Funaro - Pistoia
Mal Bianco is the second stage of the Trilogy of Vision, a project on the pictorial work of three different artists that investigates the act of seeing as an articulated form of perception.
The first stage is The Fascination of Idiocy, a work inspired by Goya's Black Paintings, where the space consists of a darkness from which bodies emerge as if from a dense mass.
In White Mal, space is turned upside down, consuming bodies, almost corroding them from the inside until they change in their appearance. The work takes as its iconographic inspiration the Japanese master Hokusai, the creator of Manga, a word that literally means "images without logical connection."
The space loses contours and perspective definitions, absorbs the bodies on stage, and returns them mangled, consumed, shadows of themselves or simulacra of decayed entities. Another reality creeps in, additional to the one we believe we see every day with our own eyes, an inner reality, of the soul and of the ghosts that everyone carries with them.
The bodies empty themselves moving in a space of structures with a ritual flavor, until they remain resigned presences with undefined contours, like the memory of a face that in memory gradually forgets, is consumed.