Denmark – Romeo Castellucci at PASSAGE Festival
PASSAGE Festival – one of Northern Europe’s largest international street theatre festivals – is taking place in Helsingør from 26 to 31 July.
The 2021 edition confirms the cosmopolitan heart of the Festival presenting the works by more than fifty European performers, poets, and artists. Among them, Romeo Castellucci and his video-installation The Third Reich (July 29 and 30, at the Kulturværftet, scheduled at 06:00 pm, 08:00 pm, 10:00 pm).
It is Castellucci’s latest work, a continuation and further development of one the central themes of his research: the role of rhetoric in art, the power of language in all its possible forms –political, social, psychoanalytic.
Inspired by Victor Klemperer’s book of the same title, in which the scholar examines how the language of the Nazi regime could affect the thinking of an entire Country, Castellucci has created a video-installation which is the image of an imposed, obligatory communication.
After a symbolic ceremony in which language is “ignited”, a sequence of all the nouns of the Italian dictionary is projected on a large screen at increasing speed, a barrage of words accompanied by Scott Gibbon’s apodictic sounds that stuns the viewer, until the retinal and mnemonic ability to retain a word appearing for one twentieth of a second starts to falter. It is the nucleus of our language’s dissolution, a “white noise, which leads to chaos”.
As we read in the director’s notes, «this furious bundle of nouns leaves no room for choice nor discernment. (…) Here, a language-machine depletes entire spheres of reality, as the nouns are all the same, mechanically mass-produced, like prefabricated buildings in a knowledge that leaves no room to escape. All pauses are abolished, occupied. The pause, or the absence of words, becomes a battlefield for the words and their military aggression».
PASSAGE Festival