Marcial Di Fonzo Bo presents audiences with an episode that brings together autobiography and fiction: a journey to Buenos Aires to follow a trial concerning an apartment, purchased from a presumed relative in 1978 but in reality was possessed from a political dissident who disappeared during the military dictatorship, which is why the family of the victim was now calling for the property to be reassigned. Visiting the scene of the crime, the actor discovers that the desaparecido was an Argentinian composer of Italian origin who, when he disappeared, was working on a piece about a Jewish pianist of who all trace was lost during the Second World War. After the case is closed, the apartment is converted into a museum-home and becomes a sort of place of memory, that theatre audiences are invited to visit.
How can a voice be given to those who have been reduced to silence? How can an absent body be represented on the stage? Through historical research and police investigation, Davide Carnevali creates a blend of literary and musical variations, examining the ways in which we re-read the past and write history. The text - published in Italy by Einaudi - was presented for the first time at the Munich Biennial and at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin in 2018 and is once again presented in a new version in French at the Comédie de Caen, the Comédie de Reims and at the Théâtre de Liège, co-producers of the project, for the 2024/25 season. It is a play constructed on the memory of people and places, created to be adapted each time to the biography of the actor and the city in which it is staged. The portrait of the artist is therefore transformed into a reflection on the barbaric acts carried out in the name of Fascism that characterised the twentieth century on a global scale. Acts that could still today return perilously.