Cantata per la festa dei bambini morti di mafia

Author

Luciano Violante

Direction

Geppy Gleijeses

Music

Franco Battiato

Set Design and Video Design

Paolo Calafiore

Festival delle Ville Vesuviane

Villa Campolieto, Ercolano 1996

Photos

Federico Riva

Abstract

The narrator's voice (Regina Bianchi) appears from the darkness sitting on a large piece of a lava stone crack, a distant, dystopian place, swept away by the sea wind and echoes of children's voices playing tag. Faces, colors, mazes and polychrome mosaics as if from Guttuso's palette become liquid and fade into the blinding white of the light. The crust of the lava cracks, and in the white a jet of blood appears, flows, slips and disappears into the light.

Press review

The Mafia defeated by the wind

Here then, in perfect harmony with the metaphorical and salvific journey imagined by Violante – the scene by Paolo Calafiore – passes from total black to an equally “extreme” white. And, what’s more, that journey is further underlined and exalted through the projection on the backdrop…

Enrico Fiore, Il Mattino (22nd july 1999)

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Mourning for the children torn to pieces by the mafia

And in the journey - the reward of the dead children there is sometimes the discovery of the sea or the impact with the reality of trafficking, contracts, violent "puppeteers" and hypocrisies, while deformed paintings by Guttuso or red cracks by Burri flow in projection, leaving room in extremis for a glimmer of faith in a wind that blows away the rottenness, and Paolo Calafiore's scenography suddenly becomes immaculate, but a gush of blood disfigures the visionary metamorphosis.

Rodolfo Di Gianmarco, La Repubblica (29th july 1996)