Interviewed for the reportage of DROME 20 dedicated to the last edition of the drodesera festival, while that of 2012 is in progress: here we go with ricci/forte
With a view to an imminent catastrophe, where would you seek refuge and which would it be your survival kit?
For once we have to begin from the end. The long-awaited hecatomb. In the viewfinder of the video-camera the battery appears charged. We play REC. Bodies upon bodies, anchored to their most beloved objects. A radiography of the useless. A blurred nothing that becomes flesh through profiteering, absolute evil, the genuine pleasure we feel in watching those we envy while they’re suffering. The same pleasure you feel when you see a limousine going the wrong way down, up the street. No more worshipped stars.
Does a catastrophe refine previous conditions? Definitely. Whether or not it has been announced, calamity is metamorphosis, transformation.
Therefore, value.
If each man is an abyss, and looking inside him can provoke vertigos, what happens when the barycentre is prey of a magnetic storm that forces him to totally reset himself. We look for a den in the place where we lost our traces. Where we allowed to other footprints to knead the direction. No isothermal blanket: the loss of heat has already chilled every particle. Compass, windproof matches to revive a hiding, lost spirit. A brass thread to built traps, but trying not to fall in them, not yet. A whistle to point out savage beasts and warn other survivors about our (alive) presence, hoarse of other people’s deafness. Safety pins used as fish-hooks, in order to keep together a handful of memories of an existence that doesn’t belong to us anymore. A pencil, that for sure, to rewrite for the umpteenth time a new story, in the light of a provident aurora borealis.
It’s a dramatic nature that doesn’t leave room for pity or compromises, the one adopted by the Roman duo ricci/forte, alias Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte, both trained at the Silvio D’Amico National Academy of Dramatic Arts and at the New York University. A gun-cotton theatre that swallows up, metabolizes and throws up madness, anxieties and stereotypes of a world and a society both crossed by inescapable contradictions. Tears and blood as traces of the decay.
text by Francesca Cogoni
photo by Carlo Beccalli for DROME magazine
-
- ricci/forte photographed in the Centrale Fies, at the drodesera festival 2011, by Carlo Beccalli for DROME magazine
web: www.ricciforte.com
