The Variational Status

The project investigates the relationship between some narrative forms (puppetry, storytellers, flying sheets, pamphlets) and a series of pre-political acts of revolt between Italy and South America. Beginning with the interest of Riccardo Giacconi for tradition as an "act of transmission", The Variational Status evokes a narrative constellation between animation, suggestion, revolt and orality. The show develops around the expiritado, a Colombian puppet character, presumably inspired by the murder of a policeman during a village party. The expiritado mask is studied in relation to the episode of the soldier Augusto Masetti, who in 1911 shot his captain in Bologna in an act of insubordination against the Italian colonial war in Libya. In both cases, the characters are united by the total amnesia of their gesture of revolt, performed in a state of trance or somnambulism. If in the case of Masetti this circumstance transformed it into a symbol for the worldwide anarchist movement that mobilized in its defense, in the case of the expiritado it becomes a comic trait of the marionette. Conceived as the deconstruction of a puppet show, the installation The Variational Status consists of an automatic marionette (built in dialogue with the historic Carlo Colla & Figli Company), from a backdrop in the form of a tent that works as a storyboard, and from a series of posters of the Espiritado show, "El Diablo en el pozo" printed with a 19th century movable type printing machine in Cali, Colombia. Working on archival documents, oral testimonies and theatrical scripts, Riccardo Giacconi intertwines the real and fictitious events of the two characters to question themselves on a document status that is not based on stable and certified supports, but that can exist purely in the form of variation . The Variational Status is co-commissioned by ar / ge kunst (Bolzano), Centrale Fies (Dro, Trento) and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), and is produced in collaboration with the sculptor Franco Citterio and the Carlo Colla & Figli Marionettistica Company (Milan), Carteles La Linterna Edigraphos (Cali), Herlyng Ferla, Carolina Valencia, Paola Villani.