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Performance ResearchA Journal of the Performing Arts

ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Relational Image

Ruth Holdsworth

To cite this article: Ruth Holdsworth (2007) Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Relational Image,Performance Research, 12:4, 104-114, DOI: 10.1080/13528160701822718

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528160701822718

Published online: 11 Mar 2010.

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Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the RelationalImager u t h h o l d s w o r t h

The working includes a first base in Cesena, withthe auto-generation of a chain of images(tragoedia endo-gonidia) from which a series ofspores will depart in order to be collected byother ‘bases’.

These spores in their turn will give rise toindividual tragic units. These units (which willbe identified with the name of the city hostingthem . . .) will have an impact on the following‘base’.

This will not be a process of accumulation butrather of living transformation.

A + B shall not equal AB.

A + B shall equal C.

The general structure is a sequence that includesa transmigration of forms inside itself.

It will be a process of evolution. There will notbe many performances, there will not be onelarge performance. The final result will be anorganism that is on the run.

The shape’s reacting and changing speedbecomes a necessary strategy in order to supportthe scope of this age.

(Romeo Castellucci 2002)

i n t r o d u c t i o n

This article considers the way the non-humanobject or matter on Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio’sstage is as efficacious as its human actorcounterpart through the way relations betweenthem as things are orchestrated. The human andthe stage object share equal status in theirobjecthood, as well as in their ability to signaland set in motion certain events or momentsduring the performance. The actor, animal orprop are interchangeable with sound and light;

the non-material has the same presence as themore materially evident.

The theoretical framework for this textreferences the work of anthropologist AlfredGell, who has written extensively on the efficacyof objects, such as the Trobriand Kula canoe-boards whose technology in terms of thetechnique, virtuosity and mystery of theircreation enchants the viewer. For Gell, objectssuch as these canoe-boards are simultaneouslyæsthetically and socially efficacious because ofthe wider relations between things (human andnon-human) they set up, mediate and aremediated by.

Here, I discuss the possible applications ofGell’s theories, in Art and Agency: An

Anthropological Theory, concerning therelational art object within the visual arts, to theperformed visual image Italian theatre companySocíetas Raffaello Sanzio’s performance cycleTragedia Endogonidia, directed by RomeoCastellucci. My intention is to draw attention tothe company’s craft and virtuosity in theconstruction of a theatre that acts upon itsspectator in a similar way to the Trobriandcanoe-boards, which Gell describes.

Most studies on art within anthropology haveused æsthetic (Coote 1992) and structuralist(Munn 1973) models of thought. Remarkably fewanthropologists have written on contemporaryartistic practice (Kuechler 2000); although itmust be acknowledged that an anthropologicalperspective is not uncommon to performancestudies scholars (Schechner 2003).

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Alfred Gell, however, adopted a methodologythat looked beyond art history’s influence onanthropology (whereby the focus of study is theinterpretation of meaning in art works), byfocusing on:• what the art object does• what its logical qualities are• what the art object’s agency might be as the

‘index’ of networks of social agency andrelations.For Gell anthropology (as the study of social

relations) and art are intimately connected.There is not one without the other. His anthro-pological theory of art is; ‘the social relations inthe vicinity of objects mediating social agency’(1998: 7). The term ‘agency’ when attributed tothe art object means that it is bound up with acertain social efficacy, similar to that of thehuman as social agent who through action andintention causes events to happen.

In Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory,Gell intends a certain rationalization of beingby making social behaviour understandable

through the art object as an index of the socialrelations that exist between ‘persons andthings, and persons and persons via things’(1998: 12). Despite this focus, his methodologycan be extended to include objects that are notgenerally termed as ‘art’. There are some limitedreferences to dance in the context of its relationto graphic patterning (94–5) and also toperformance art in relation to the body as artobject, but art and the role of the relationalperformed visual image in theatre is not dealtwith. It is this lack that I hope to address in thisarticle.

Between January 2002 and December 2004Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio worked on a dramaticeleven-episodic cycle entitled Tragedia

Endogonidia, which was performed across tenEuropean cities.1 Many of these episodescontinue to be performed. My interest comesfrom having seen many of the episodes and alsofrom having worked at London InternationalFestival of Theatre (LIFT) with Socíetas

Raffaello Sanzio as the project manager for the

1 Cesena – C#.01, January2002; Avignon – A#.02Festival d’Avignon, July2002; Berlin – B#.03Hebbel Theatre, January2003; Brussels – B#.04Kunsten Festival desArts, May 2003; Bergen –B#.05 InternationalFestival Norway, May2003; Paris – P#.06Festival d’Automne andThéâtre de l’Europe,October 2003; Rome –R#.07 RomaeuropaFestival, November 2003;Strasbourg – S#.08 LeMaillon Théâtre deStrasbourg, February2004; London – L#.09London InternationalFestival of Theatre (LIFT),May 2004; Marseille –M#.10 Les Bernadinesavec le Théâtre duGymnase, September2004; Cesena – C#.11,December 2004.

• Figure 1. Bergen – B#.05.Photograph by Luca del Pia.

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London (L#. 09) episode of the cycle at Laban,Deptford in May 2004.

This episodic cycle, which Castellucci calls ‘anorganism on the run’, uses the socio-geographiesof each city visited to craft performances thatattempt to respond to the weight of modern dayhistory and ‘some of the intractable concerns ofcontemporary European life’ (Kelleher 2003).Tragedia Endogonidia is the title given to all ofthe episodes, and each one is numberedaccording to the sequence of each city visited.‘Endogonidia’ refers to those simple livingbeings that have within themselves gonadsallowing them to self-reproduce unceasinglyaccording to both a notion of their ownimmortality yet also a certain scission from

themselves. ‘Tragedia’ on the other handpresumes the death of the hero, which forCastellucci is contained in each presence of life.

Despite sharing the same title, no twoperformances of the eleven are the same – theexperience and context of the image or object ineach performance is never identical to the onethat precedes or follows it. Re-occurring motifsand prototyped images are constantlyrearranged in a Warburgian fashion to visuallyrepresent social and cultural history, just as thepaintings of Raphael have been used asprototypes in the European tradition ofnarrative history painting. Images are dispersedas spores and morphing prototypes throughouteach episode. Gell’s theories concerning images

• Figure 2. Bergen – B#.05.Photograph by Luca del Pia.

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as reproductive and generative prototypes,which I will later address, are particularlyrelevant when one considers the term‘Endogonidia’. In his Painting and Experience in

Fifteenth-Century Italy, Michael Baxandallargues that Renaissance painting is the ‘depositof a social relationship’ (1974: 1); this is also thecase for the performed visual image as arelational art object in Tragedia Endogonidia.

gell’s anthropological methodologyfor understanding human agency andthe agency of relational art objects

For Gell there is a certain worldly ‘fleshiness’ ofsocial relations (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 130–55) inwhich the domains of people and objects merge –are mutually touching and being touched andare reciprocally tangible to one another: ‘Ipropose that “art-like situations” can bediscriminated as those in which the material“index” (the visible, physical “thing”) permits aparticular cognitive operation which I identifyas the abduction of agency’ (Gell 1998: 13). Gellside-steps any philosophical defense of notionsof agency and intention, to focus instead on thepracticable and the everyday realm in whichobjects and persons develop relationalassociations through the abduction of theattribution of intention (agency).

The art object as the fulcrum and index of thesocial interaction is ‘enmeshed in a (reciprocal)texture of social relationships’ (1998: 17) andhas causal properties that enable the action oneis able to infer via the index (the ‘thing’) of otherhuman social agents. Through an object’sagency, and the way objects attach themselvesto people, one abducts analogies (resemblanceand connectedness) to construct everyday socialrelations. As Barbara Stafford highlights,‘analogy is the vision of ordered relationshipsarticulated as similarity-in-difference’ (2001: 9).

Gell believes that creative potential exists inthe inter-artefactual (the relational art object)domain. The performed visual image inCastellucci’s work, understood as existing in aninter-artefactual domain, is continually

rearranged and put into new systems ofrelations. Castellucci, like Gell, looks at how artfunctions, with its own kind of agency, withinthe nexus of social relations, where creativepotential comes about not through the image asself-referential but through the relation of theimage to other images and objects on stage.

Key to Gell’s anthropological methodologyregarding the relations between persons and theindex (the art object) are four terms:• the index• the artist – the originator• the recipient(s) – receiver(s) of the index• the prototype of the index.

Firstly, the index as art object is the sign fromwhich causal inferences and abductions ofagency can be made regarding persons or‘things’, and in light of ‘the social-relationalmatrix in which it is embedded’ (1998: 7). Theindex encompasses in its personhood andagency the social relations bound up in itsoriginal production and also in its changingspatial and temporal biography, that is, in whatcontext it is placed. The action and intention weinfer from the index is not static – socialrelations are forever in flux and so too is whatwe infer from them. Secondly, the art objectindexes its origin, namely the artist(s) whoseactions caused it to be in existence. Thirdly, oneinfers not only the agency of the artist from theindex (art object) but also a secondary origin,which one abducts as its reception anddestination in a recipient (in the case of thisessay the spectator of the theatre performanceTragedia Endogonidia). Finally, the prototype,which is of most relevance to this article, is therepresentation and reproduction of the(original) entity it is supposed to portray:

I shall use the term ‘prototype’ (of an index) toidentify the entity which the index representsvisually (as an icon, depiction etc) or non-visually. . . there is a species of agency which is abductedfrom the index, such that the prototype is eithera social agent (in relation to the index) or patient(via the index).

(Gell 1998: 26)

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Much work has been done on the notion ofprototype, and of particular significance isWalter Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction. My interest isin the way Castellucci uses images in thecyclical episodes of Tragedia Endogonidia asgenerative and reproducible prototypes ofentities that symbolize his understanding andrepresentation of the cultural and historicalmilieu of present day social relations in each ofthe cities visited

For Gell there are differing configurations ofthe way the index, the artist, the recipient andthe prototype inter-relate to one another. In fact,he names thirty-six hierarchical and oftencomplex possibilities. In addition to these fourterms, Gell outlines that each of them can be ineither an agent or patient position with regard

to one another, and these relations are far fromstatic – at any moment the agent can become thepatient and vice versa. The agent is who or whatcausally affects the patient: ‘in any giventransaction in which agency is manifested,there is a “patient” who or which is another

“potential” agent, capable of acting as an agentor being a locus of agency’ (1998: 22).

Gell moves beyond Kantian, Enlightenmentand sociological (Bourdieu 1984; Berger 1972)notions of æsthetics, which in the latter modelsof institutional theory (in which the artinstitution bestows value upon the art object),and/or intentionality theory (in which the artisthas bestowed upon the object special insight)are adopted. Instead, Gell moves towards amaterial, biological and cognitiveunderstanding of the relational art object. Thisunderstanding of the art object is shared byCastellucci, who stages visual representationsas indexes of a modern European culturalsensibility: ‘a good performance shouldcondense itself in an image, the image of anorganism . . . matter is the ultimate reality. It isunderstood as holding the least possiblecommunication . . . the lowest level of possiblecommunication is the matter’s surface’(Castellucci 2000: 23).

One great influence on Gell’s work is thephenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, and another isEdmund Husserl, whose notion of time-consciousness with regard to protentions andretentions he discusses in relation to the artist’soeuvre as a distributed object (1998: 232–42).Husserl’s theories of time are central to Gell’sunderstanding of the artist’s oeuvre as atemporal object where in any index (art work) wemay abduct and infer traces of previous orpossible future works. This is of great relevanceto how Castellucci and his company create eachepisode of Tragedia Endogonidia asrepresentative of 1) their own artistic oeuvre, 2)the image as spatio-temporally distributedobject within and across each episode, 3) theepisode as spatio-temporally distributed objectand 4) and contemporary European social,

• Figure 3. London – L#.09.Photograph by Luca del Pia.

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historical and cultural relations which are farfrom chronological. This non-linear spatial andtemporal distribution of the image as prototypewill later be discussed with regard to theinfluence of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas onthe work of Castellucci.

the performed visual image as aprototype in tragedia endogonidia

Castellucci explores the ‘strangeness’ ofcontemporary civic life through the theatricalexperience (Fig.1), developing a dialogue withthe audience which attempts to question therelevance and role of theatre as an art form insocial exchange. In Tragedia Endogonidia socio-cultural historical visual cues move away frominternational ‘monumentalism’ to attend to thelocal particularities (histories and concerns) ofeach city visited within a larger Europeanlandscape. The citizens of each city are, in asense, already deeply embedded in the exchangebetween stage and spectator.

The performed visual image in this theatre isunsettling, violent, emotional, beautiful andalien to the traditional and structural mimeticaspirations of theatre. What is crucial to eachperformance is how matter (such as animals,fantastically complicated and mechanizedprops, and light) is placed in a relationalassociation with both the human actor andspectator (see Fig.2). The tragedy of modern daylife is communicated by being objectified and bybeing situated within a non-linear art/imagenexus spanning all eleven episodes.

As Gell argues in Art and Agency: An

Anthropological Theory, the art object with itsown particular biography comes to be ‘theprojection of certain stylistic principles whichform larger unities, just as each individual, in akin-based society, is regarded as a projection,into the here and now, of principles of descentand alliance and exchange’ (1998: 154).Castellucci’s episodes work in a similar way inTragedia Endogonidia, through the distributionof prototypes from original indexes (such asimages, the matter on stage – light and sound,

actors and animals) featuring in previousperformances in any one of the cities visited.Motifs and images are distributed throughouteach of the eleven episodes like spores: the‘episode does not carry the weight of a messageto be delivered and communicates as little aspossible, but this cannot be defined as“fragment” or “metonymy” . . . it remainsrootless’ (Castellucci: 2002).

The inferences of intention humans makethrough cognition have been described asabduction in semiotics and in logic. Gell takeshis lead from the semiotic theories of CharlesPeirce but claims that the meaning derived fromindexes and prototypes does not function likethat derived from language. Gell believes thatabduction (inferences made from cognition) isalso part of the visual and ‘non-linguistic’ socialworld, in which artefacts are the objectificationof social agency: ‘the stipulation I make is thatthe index is itself seen as the outcome and/orthe instrument of social agency’ (1998: 15).Castellucci takes this one step further bymaking the performed visual image the outcome

and/or the instrument of social relations.In addition to the arte-facts and images as

prototypes on stage, Castellucci includes mattersuch as animals and the human actor asrelational objects; the actor on stage is reducedto the dull perfection of matter and ‘things’.Castellucci explores the dualism, and theattraction and repulsion between object andsubject as created through the concept ofculture, similar to the tearing loose from the‘facticity of the world’ that Simmel so eloquentlydescribes (1997: 55). More is said through theabsence of recognizable speech and sound; thistheatre is a place where recognition of what ispresented is abducted through a few visual cuesbeyond the condition of language. This tragedy,unlike Greek tragedy, has no chorus acting as acommentary on what is seen. During the Parisepisode the orchestra filed on, yet got up againhaving made no audible contribution to theperformance. As Gell describes regarding theprocess of abduction, Castellucci rejects the idea

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of direct depiction and iconic representationbased on semiotic analysis and symbolicconvention, in order to understand thecomplexity of social life:

Technique must be overcome: economy shouldhave nothing to do with the theatre . . . My goal isa technique that moves beyond itself – a super-technique resting on its own, vanished, agnosticand unprotected operation. Close to chance, toinvisibility, as well as touching its opposite – thesuper-technique of the animal. Not being afraidto be wrong, but having a ‘panicking fear’ . . . of‘being there’ on the stage.

(Castellucci 2000: 25)

Objects are identifiable in terms of the socialvalue and social belief systems associated withthe image, as well as with matter. In the processof abduction we infer what the prototype issymbolic of. This is similar to the act of analogydescribed by Barbara Stafford (2001). There aremany re-occurring ‘symbolic’ motifs, and oneparticular example is that of flags as symbolicof geographically bounded social relations. Inthe London episode two huge Union Jack flagsappeared through the back of the theatre walland were accompanied by deafening crashingsounds that made one’s body vibrate as theymoved from side to side against the back wall ofthe stage. This depicted not only that theepisode was about London as the capital of theU.K., but also the socio-historical impact ofEngland’s historical imperial aspirations andactivities as a nation.

The spectator of Tragedia Endogonidia seesan animal on stage (for example, thechimpanzee in the opening section of the Romeepisode, the seven cats in London or the blackand white horses in Paris, Marseille and Cesena)and senses not only the confidence the animalhas in its own body but also the discomfort ithas with ‘being there’ in an alien black-boxenvironment. What the spectators infer fromthese visual cues is their own confidence asembodied human agents but also the intractablealienation felt in the modern age of immaterialtechnological communication.

It is carnal theatre. Through the use of simplematter (animals) and performed visual imagerytaken from our European socio-historicalmemory banks, the spectator is made to ‘re-recognize’ and to ‘re-communicate’ with theirbody as playing a role in the agency theyexercise in the practicable and everyday realmof social relations. The sense of the performedvisual image with regard to one’s matter andone’s body as an object situated within a Gellianinter-artefactual domain was particularlyintense in the sixth episode in Paris. A scenethat started with the image of Christ breakinginto a museum-like space, with only a marblesphinx and a white horse to the side, was joltedout of its extreme silence as one, then another,and then yet another car came crashing down onto the stage floor from the rigging and from aheight of about 25 metres. The cars fell aroundthe actor playing Christ, the sphinx and anunflinching horse. The meaning to beinterpreted was complex, but on a simpler levelwhat it did was emphasize the agency andmateriality of humans and objects inextricablybound up, co-existent, co-dependent and inter-related.

In each episode the recipient, as spectator, isenveloped within the materiality and matter onstage – we not only see it but feel it, smell it andalmost touch it. In the final episode in Cesena inDecember 2004 the auditorium of the theatrewas plunged into complete darkness for aboutfive minutes as powerful gusts of windcirculated around the audience. Sound alsoplays an elemental role in each of theseepisodes, in which the composer Scott Gibbonselectronically manipulates and crafts complexsound, frequently using only the human voice.Sound is placed in a relational context to thelighting, objects and matter on stage, so thatboth the mind and body of the spectator isaffected and accessed.

The skill of Castellucci and the other membersof the company in producing these episodicperformances as indexes of European social lifecan be described in terms of the specialist craft,

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virtuosity and tacit knowledge of the maker,who has the capacity to make the object, oncecirculating in networks of social exchange,appear ‘magical’. The theatre auditorium is anetwork of social exchange, where the exchangebetween artist and recipient is continuous andaffected by the agency of the index andperformed visual image as prototype. Thenetwork of social exchange within and beyondthe theatre auditorium is mirrored by whathappens on stage, and vice versa. Crucially, inplace of a purely æsthetic understanding ofwhat the art object does, Castellucci privilegesincantation because he understands the efficacyof the prototype as performed visual image andthe materiality of the stage (light, sound, actors,props, animals etc). There is a certain level ofmagic that is bound up in the object; the objectis invested, through human agency, with acertain personhood and agency: ‘in a theatre inwhich natural jus counts, a pine tree or a goathas a gravity equal to the human’ (Castellucci2000: 27).

Gell wrote at length on the social efficacy ofthe material form of an art object in an earlierwork, The Technology of Enchantment and The

Enchantment of Technology (1982), in which heconsiders how art objects work without uscompletely understanding the possibility of thecraft that enabled their creation: ‘I maintain,therefore, that technical virtuosity is intrinsicto the efficacy of works of art in their socialcontext, and tends always towards the creationof asymmetries in the relations between peopleby placing them in an essentially asymmetricalrelation to things’ (l982: 173). Behind everyindex there is an artist-magician.

For Castellucci the inescapable truth in theWestern world for is that wherever there is awriter there is a man. The woman is privilegedin Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio’s work, and matteris considered as feminine on stage. This isembodied in Castellucci’s use of light and soundas matter. In Tragedia Endogonidia there aretwo paths, one is the materiality of theatre andthe other is the figure of the mother and child

(Fig.4). The actors do not exhaust the possibilityof the show, they enrich it. They are a partialmechanism, poised to work with the otherelements of the theatre, such as light and sound(Fig.3). The actor can remain on stage, but bereplaced by a light for example. The anonymityof the actor is a mechanism that allows thespectators get close to themselves. Tragedia

Endogonidia rearranges the spectator’s positionwithin the ancient Greek tragedy form into aposition crucial to the existence of the art-nexus.

a b y w a r b u r g ’ s m n e m o s y n e a t l a s

Castellucci’s work is influenced by Aby Warburg,a German intellectual born in 1866 whose workcentred on the social context of Renaissance art.Warburg assembled a huge library, which in therise of Fascism was moved to London in 1933,where it became part of the Warburg Institute,which continues to focus on cultural history. Inthe episodes of Tragedia Endogonidia, and

• Figure 4. Paris – L#.06.Photograph by Luca del Pia.

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through the use of spore-like images asprototypes and relational art objects, Castellucciadopts similar techniques to those used byWarburg in the creation of his Mnemosyne Atlas

– a project begun in 1927. The Mnemosyne Atlas

took the form of a picture atlas that could berearranged as one or more themes concerningWarburg’s reconstruction of a ‘particularsociohistorical cultural milieu’ (Rampley 1997:44) gained dominance in his mind. AsE. H. Gombrich explains, Warburg had a‘psychological need to tell a complex story bymeans of pictures’ (1970: 285). Warburg wasinfluenced by the ethnologist Bastian who wasconcerned with ‘the way different civilizationspicture and represent the universe’, and, asGombrich clarifies, like Bastian ‘Warburgwanted his “Atlas to present an inventory ofbasic human reactions, but in his philosophythese reactions were as much emotional as theywere intellectual. . . . [I]t was the origin of mythand science . . . that justified . . . the groupingtogether of the mental images of the cosmicforces and the expression of basic emotions inritual and art’ (1970: 286).

Warburg was also greatly influenced by theessay on empathy by Robert Vischer, On the

Optical Sense of Form (1873), in which Vischeranalyzes the dialectical relationship betweenseeing and looking, ‘implying the primaryimportance of the subject with the world,inasmuch as the world becomes meaningfulonly through a process of reflection andanalysis’ (Rampley 1997: 45). As such, looking at(combined with its other sensual qualities), andnot just seeing, Tragedia Endogonidia is whatmakes this theatre as a nexus of relational andperformed visual images and materiality soevocative of, and bound up in, contemporaryEuropean social relations. The empathy we havethrough the constantly rearranged index andprototyped image as fulcrums of social relationson and off stage causes the spectator ofTragedia Endogonidia to invest value in theworld through active and bodily participation inthe visual and sensual cues offered.

c o n c l u s i o n

An image, an allegory, a form disguising what itmeans to reveal, has more meaning to the mindthan the enlightenment brought about by wordsor their analysis.

(Antonin Artaud 1970: 53)

In experiencing Tragedia Endogonidia

(emotionally, intellectually, sensually), thespectator is made to infer their own agency inrelation to the social exchanges and networksthat they are engaged in. Castellucci’s self-reproducing and relational episodes, throughtheir almost textual silence and matter andform, function as indexes projecting back to thespectator the social relations they are bound upin as Europeans. The episodes represent thealienation and rootless-ness of modern-day life,but offer a thought to the future by adopting thenon-linear dynamics of the materiality of lifeand cultural memories such as those of war (nomatter how disturbing this may be) over andabove the invisible dynamics of modern-daytechnology and information systems. Subtlechanges in the rearrangement of images canhave huge repercussions over the look, feel andsound of an episode. For Castellucci, as forWarburg and Gell,2 there is not necessarily adivide between science and the humanities(effected in Europe, at least, during theEnlightenment).

As Gell argues, creative potential comes notfrom the object itself or the isolated performedvisual image, for example, but from its inter-artefactual relation with other objects, which forCastellucci can include the actor or the animalbeing on stage. Just as important as what theimage is saying, for understanding Castellucci’sand Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio’s work, is how theimage is used to carry information and tocommunicate (European) culture. The leadingimage on each programme produced for all theepisodes is the image sent into space with theNASA Pioneer F spacecraft in 19723 which wasintended as a visual codex to communicate toextra-terrestrials the essence of humanity on

2 Gell makes specificreference to fractals,geometry and carryingnumber sequences asmaking artefacts‘cognitively sticky’ and ascarriers of profoundmeaning, especially inrelation to decorativeform and style (1998:73–94, 155–215).

3 Great Images in NASA[online]. Available from:<http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001621.html> The key totranslating the plaque onPioneer F lies inunderstanding thebreakdown of the mostcommon element in theuniverse – hydrogen.Gombrich also discussesthis image in ‘The VisualImage’ in The Image and

The Eye: Further Studies

in the Psychology of

pictorial Representation

(1982).

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earth. Castellucci uses this codex to considerhow tragedy as a theatrical form can be used, oris exhausted, by what humans might wish tocommunicate as the essence (the ‘DNA’) ofhumanity in current times.

Castellucci takes the specifically Westernrepresentational form of the attic tragedy andflouts it, an art-form used and known widely byEuropean artists and audiences alike. It is asocially recognized form that has historicallybeen used to mediate social relations. Histheatre is a sphinx that adopts a form similar tothat of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. It is a formthat posits the non-linear dynamics of aEuropean socio-historical cultural milieu, andone that is closer to human experience before itis cognized in to a chronology of events – namelyspontaneous memory before it is objectified intoa cohesive history. He takes well-known symbolsand images, such as Christ, museum, flags,Hebrew writing, weapons, Communism, fascismand racism, and rearranges them into an‘endogonidic’ form. In a presentation on theepisodes in 2004 Romeo Castellucci said:

A new political meaning surrounds andestablishes the civil group of spectators whowitness this new tragedy. A thought addressed tothe future will come out of this tragedy. As amatter of fact, it’s not only a re-elaboration ofmyths and ancient figures. The proposal isentirely projected on contemporaneous images,which only refer to themselves. Hence, we are infront of original pictures that question ourunderstanding without giving us reading keysthat are sure or pre-defined.

(Castellucci 2004)

This work was, and still is, constantly evolvingand in production. It is a dramatic system on theincrease, and each episode is a stage of change.The conceptual side of the work has a certainframework before the company arrives in eachcity, but the production is actually made andcrafted in the two weeks within the theatrespace of the host city before it opens to a public.In more ways than one it is an open work, inwhich anything can happen. Its inventiveness is

in its unmediated capacity to respond to thesurrounding civic environment of the city thathosts it. As Castellucci describes, it is an‘organism on the run’.

Castellucci closes down on the distinctionbetween myth and science by choosingperformances that access matter (on stage)before any notions of tragedy and God replacedthe primacy of ‘being there’. For Castellucci, asfor Warburg, it is not ‘so much a problem offormal traditions as one of collectivepsychology’ (Gombrich 1970: 307). Castellucci’stheatre as a contribution to ideas about thevisual representation of social exchange is asignificant one. Meaning is given through theincantation and matter of their highlyinnovative theatrical form, which has beencollectively crafted by one of the most originalinternational theatre-making companiesworking today.

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