SPECULUM CELESTIALE - MEMORIA NATURALIS

Second meeting MEMORIA NATURALIS
Saturday 26th May 2007 - Entrance of the San Martino Vineyard, 7 pm.

Piana degli Ulivi 8.00 pm.
An argument on the impossibility of the Theatre to offer
the best of itself over and above representation

a glosso-didiactic demonstration - 1st recreational garden
demonstration/performance Domenico Mennillo
installations by lunGrabbe/Rosaria Castiglione

LudiMagister
an exemplary reading - 2nd recreational garden
demonstration/performance Domenico Mennillo
installations by Rosaria Castiglione/lunGrabbe
electric piano Alessandra Cesarini
cello Marco Di Palo
violin Marco Esposito

Piana delle Farfalle 9.30 pm.
ab anima permanent bio-installation by Maurizio Elettrico
curated by Raffaella Morra and Antonio Festa

Diary of an Alien at the End of the World
From a text by Maurizio Elettrico
Music Francesco Calzolaro
voice Claudio Grimaldi
bassoon Francesca Alterio
clarinet Francesco Calzolaro
trumpet Giacomo Lucci
Dancers
Giuseppina Perrotta
Maria Grazia Perrotta
Maria Grazia Russo
dance of the butterflies Vera

An argument on the impossibility of the Theatre to offer the best of itself over and above representation is a performance based on a 2005 text of the same name by Domenico Mennillo. This was dedicated to the word “Theatre”, in its assertion and interpretation of the “public space of representation”. The performance is a small axiomatic demonstration (dear to the speculations of Aristotle, even if it is here defined as glosso-didactic) on the impossibility of contemporary theatre (and not only theatre) to have the ability to express other expressive potential not connected to the thousand-year old tradition of representation. The performance takes place on the Piana degli Ulivi in the San Martino Vineyard, a space here defined as the first recreational garden, Platonically fenced with thin poles of rough wood, inside of which stands a flipchart, one or more sheep and a basin with rosewater and coloured brushes. The leader of the Argument will attempt to define/demonstrate where the possibilities of in-expression of the representative act lie. The audience however, will be comfortably seated on wooden benches just outside the first recreational garden, watching the demonstration of the Argument. The entire performance/demonstration is sound-tracked with electronic music.

LudiMagister - second recreational garden Once the performance/demonstration in the first recreational garden is over, the audience move to a nearby space, called the second recreational garden, site of the second demonstration. LudiMagister is the title of a poem in five meta-sections by Domenico Mennillo. Ludimagister is the teacher in an ancient Roman elementary school, where the Latin word ludus took on the meaing of school. In the five meta-sections of the poem, however, the didactic ludics of Latin origin are explained using some modern forms of “hybris” from school learning. The second recreational garden, also wooden-fenced like the preceding garden, has a wooden stage on which an old desk is propped, along with a conference microphone and some white sheets of paper. The audience, once arrived in the second recreational garden, are seated at their discretion on one of the two rows of benches positioned outside of the fence and facing the desk. The leader of the Argument enters the fenced area and, accompanied by a violinist and a cello and an electric piano players, reads the five meta-sections of the poem. Once the (exemplary) reading is over, the man leaves, thus ending the performance/demonstration and the visit to the two recreational gardens of the San Martino Vineyard.

ab anima is a permanent bio-installation conceived by Maurizio Elettrico with the help of Antonio Festa and Raffaella Morra. ab anima evokes the unnatural enchantment of a garden made paradisiacal by human artifice as well as the animal symbolism of an ancient bestiary arising from the cultivation of rare and strange species of butterfly. The incongruous juxtaposition of the arboreal examples planted alongside strange terracotta forms will show obscure elementary spirits. This work is a response to the necessity of a violent encounter between art and nature, the idea of the reclaiming of the land on an aesthetic and spiritual level, as a place of immanent mysticism and as an occasion for the birth of a new biological philosophy connected to the praxis of art on nature. In this work embryo-like bases are laid down for a theoretical and practical bio-demiurgy which sees nature as the inspirational matrix as well as the sub-strata of human creative activity. The living species are therefore re-contextualised and adapted to new biospheres planned and created under philosophical and aesthetic criteria, continuing to respect the functional parameters of their specific characteristics and original habitat. The terracotta shapes, which above all represent heads, crystallise the ethereal sylvan and rural presences traditionally pictured as hybrids, and therefore as spirits of passage from one biological domain into another. They suggest a possible cross between spiritual and material levels (bodiless elementary spirits administering every living bodily thing) and again that between organic and inorganic, between the manipulated form of art and the predetermined one of nature.

Diary of an Alien at the End of the World is a performance inspired by Maurizio Elettrico’s short story. The story uses dense, lyrical prose to describe a paradoxical science fiction reconstruction of the next step in human evolution, leading right up until the day of extinction. The narrative technique is that of a diary, the final document of an alien studying human archaeology, with only his own company to enjoy on the now wild planet Earth.

Vigna San Martino Napoli
Saturday, 26 May, 2007 - 19:00