Il cielo non è un fondale

“The question of what is real, or reality, and how it can be represented in art and in particular in theatre, has always interested us”, write Deflorian and Tagliarini. They have been working together as authors, actors, performers, and directors since 2008. In preparing for Reality (2012), and prior to tackling the 748 notebooks to which Janina Turek had meticulously consigned half a century’s worth of the minute details of her uneventful existence, they went to Poland to experience for themselves the same daily routine and immerse themselves in the familiar territories of this otherwise unknown housewife. In Ce ne andiamo..., created a year later, one of the show’s ambitions was to make us feel, on a bare stage, the pressurized nature of everyday existence in the all too tangible circumstances of life in Greece today: the squealing of metal shutters being rolled down, with no hope of being rolled up again, the rumble of traffic trams and demonstrations, and silhouettes perched over bins, busily sifting through their contents. According to the two artists, this very real presence of the city of Athens, a backdrop from which the various gestures are detached in order to bring out their full significance in political terms, explains the natural transition towards their new project. Running between them is the common theme of “the landscape as protagonist”, or alternatively “the irreversible phenomena of the metropolisation of landscape and lifestyle” - in this the beginning of the 21st century, in which the human species, for the first time in its history, has become primarily an urban one.

For more than a few seasons now, Deflorian and Tagliarini have been gathering material in preparation for their work on Il cielo non è un fondale. The relationship between background and figure inevitably pointed them in the direction of visual art. In 2014, in Milan, they co-presented Il posto (a term which is the Italian translation of Annie Ernaux’s work: La Place), an in situ study-performance in the presence of an extraordinary collection of works by Novecento. The two performers also developed a shared interest in land art, such as Sophie Calle’s research into the reversal of the hierarchy of human presence and its surroundings (Voir la mer), as well as that of the Dutch artist, Berndnaut Smilde and his recreation of indoor clouds. They studied the documentary work of Nicolò Basseti, the author of a prize-winning investigation into Rome’s major ring-road at last year’s Venice Festival.

Lastly, their research has taken them in the direction of the obsessive nature of the rhythms of contemporary life, and this “hyperactive efficacity” which constantly prompts us to see more and more, but which increasingly prevents us from looking around us, without any immediate objective in mind - and from simple contemplation... What do we mean by “to live in”?. If it is true that “we have traded-in our interior life for an indoor life”, in what way do our various forms of shelter let us think about those left “out in the rain”? The show cannot and will not be reduced into an anthology of material gathered during two years of research. Deflorian and Tagliarini’s new work promises to be dazzling in every sense of the word.