Exhibition
By: Cuocolo/Bosetti
With: Roberta Bosetti
Directed by: Renato Cuocolo
Curated by: Gaia Morrione;
Produced by: IRAA Theatre (Melbourne),Teatro di Dionisio (Torino), Nuovi Paesaggi Urbani (Roma)
In collaboration with Aldo Miguel Grompone (Rome), Nicoletta Scrivo (Verona),
Claudio Ponzana (Modena)
Administration: Paola Falorni
Press Office: Paola Maritan

“I have a museum in my mind”

Exhibition is a new performance by the award-winning Italian/Australian company Cuocolo/Bosetti.
Created to be performed in museums, the work questions the nature of an art exhibition.
A group of twenty-five visitors with radio headsets walks through the museum spaces guided by the voice of the actress.
Through the flow of the performer’s words, a unique art gallery takes shape before us.
An oral exhibition where paintings and artists are connected by stumbling over memories.
An imaginary museum of paintings that are seen and felt, and evoke a moment, an experience in our lives.
Images of the paintings and images of life create an inner museum.
The entire museum is reinterpreted and intensified by this interaction.
The performance – without altering the existing spaces but rather embracing the sense of permanence that characterizes them – offers a diversion from the museum. The result is the discovery, inside a genuine location, of a hidden introspective and intimate place with the possibility of disorientation and the probability of getting lost.

Walking through a museum is always a means to create one’s own map, a psychogeography in which observation, knowledge and experience intertwine.
A museum without walls transformed from a place of conservation into a theatre of experience.
The story of Exhibition is a story of abandonment. It questions what place art has in our lives.

I visited museums when I was younger. At the time, I was searching for answers. Now I return to understand whether paintings can really repair damages.
Do we really need these paintings?
Will these paintings save us? C/B
Exhibition is a site-specific work that adapts each time to the space and context in which it is performed.
Gaia Morrione
“Art will always be autobiographical and autobiographies will always be fictitious”

We’ve always looked ahead, rehearsing the future.
We imagine what kind of theatre would be performed after the catastrophe. A theatre that calls into question its function, the idea of community, its technical possibilities, the distance between actor and character, and the relationship between reality and fiction.

Theatre must be essential again.

We will be left with a glimpse. And the word and the voice.
The glimpse will have to change. The wonder of what it sees will help us. The new situation will be like a continuous exercise of not perceiving anything as insignificant.

Things have their own voice and we should learn this silent language. This is an unsettling experience. Everything we see that was once familiar to us now acquires a disturbing, unfamiliar effect; a faraway “something” that is extremely close to us. The ordinary will no longer be ordinary but extraordinary.

The experience of a different view of the world is already well known to us today. Personally, we began to put it into practice a long time ago. Besides, places, things, faces, chance stories are simply waiting to be seen.

The fact is that there has always been a mysterious area and it will be even more present in the future. Theatre specializes in exploring this prospect.

The theatre that will come after the catastrophe begins from our interior view of the world.
But, hasn’t it always been like this? At least for the things we have left, that influenced us, that have a less ephemeral sense?

Borges wrote about a painter who wanted to paint the world so he painted lakes, hills, mountains and forests, boats and dead animals and people. At the end of his life, while he was putting together his paintings and drawings, he realized that the immense collage represented his face.

Art will always be autobiographical and autobiographies will always be fictitious.

But all this will be new given that in the future there will be nothing ancient under the sun. At least, that’s what I believe and I feel privileged to nearing the end still believing in something.

Cuocolo/Bosetti