Tonight opens with the usual preview - at the Academy of Spain the Milanese duo of artists and researchers Invernomuto and the producer and DJ Hugo Sanchez - Short Theatre 2019 that until 14 fires its fireworks in various spaces of the capital. And this year the fires are many, because the Roman theater festival has continued to grow over the years and his gaze on the Italian contemporary scene has continued to broaden the political horizons (Short has a vocation to question languages, ideas, social forms. The press release reads: "Recognising that making culture now, can only be an exercise in political action, community dialogue, linguistic demarcation".), and obviously artistic because it has always intercepted news and trends on the contemporary scene, so much so as to become an enviable event for other major cities. Artists such as Alessandro Sciarroni, the Finnish/Egyptian Samira Elagoz, Manuela Cherubini, the visual artist Kader Attia, Nora chipaumire are often unusual interpreters of the present.
"We have continued a strong relationship with Italian and international artists - explains Fabrizio Arcuri, director with Francesca Corona of the festival supported by the association AREA06 - and in the wake of their work we have identified stimuli, suggestions that have marked the program this year summarized in the title "VISION OF TOGETHER",: which for us means to collect the different perspectives looking for connections, but it also means the urgency of the artists to observe the things of reality with a bit of distance and without losing details but trying to reorganize the priorities, to share experiences and practices with an inclusive look, therefore with perspectives that overturn the authoritarian paths that we have seen in these months".
This year there are also many news from the appointment of Francesca Corona as a consultant for the Teatro di Roma. Did it involve any changes in the festival?
"Francesca's appointment hasn't changed anything. The festival was born inside the Teatro di Roma since the first edition, and we have always maintained, in alternate phases depending on who the artistic director was, a relationship with that institution. The appointment is also an acknowledgement of the work he has done and is doing for the Festival in recent years".
Another novelty is that of new spaces that the festival will occupy.
"The most important change is that the first part of the festival takes place in a new space, WeGil, a large multipurpose container regenerated by the Lazio Region from the building of the architect Luigi Moretti, which was born in 1937 as the seat of the Italian Youth of the Littorio. A space therefore difficult to cross because turning through those rooms and still very strong the fascist identity, starting with the signs - maps, writings and other - of colonialism. We therefore decided to take an action, to free it from those ghosts with a re-signification of its symbols in the opposite sense, anti-fascist and anti-colonial. It is a matter of re-reading that place through the languages and performative practices of artists and not only. We have in fact built a path for the spectators with scholars, historians and philosophers to understand what it means to be there: there will be Simone Frangi, former director of Viafarini, the writer Igiaba Scego, Ilenia Caleo and Isabella Pinto. Kader Attia, French-Algerian visual artist will bring here the documentary film The Body's Legacies, Part 2: The Postcolonial Body presented at Manifesta in Palermo in 2018, which reflects on the bodies and post-colonization, on the migrant body, or the feminist political scientist Francoise Verges who on the 7th will give a speech on the decolonization of the work starting from her latest text Feminisme decolonial. Just as here at WeGil it will make sense to see Burning Play-Pitch #1 by Manuela Cherubini, a lecture-show and a project in stages about Nawal Al Sa'adawi, a great Egyptian writer who has been imprisoned many times for her writings on women and on what religion prohibits interventions in the care and self-protection of women's bodies. Cherubini traced the only English translation of her comedy God Resigns at The Summit Meeting, written in 1996 and never performed, burned by the Egyptian authorities. And again the choreographer nora chipaumire, artist and choreographer of Zimbabwe active in the United States, with 100% POP, chapter a trilogy on the icons of her years of training in Zimbabwe - in this case Grace Jones".
