In 2018, Contrasto published “L’armata dei senzatetto”, a collection of works of art and words by Ascanio Celestini and Giovanni Albanese: the former an actor, one of the leading exponents of that “new narrative theatre” made up of stories, encounters, imaginations and human dramaturgy, brought together and presented in the form of new writings; the latter an artist, but also a director and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, a master in the practice of collecting and regenerating objects found in markets, workshops, scrapyards, attics and old warehouses: waste material, reinvented with irony, poetic delicacy and a conceptual approach. Everything is transformed in the metropolitan cemetery overflowing with scrap metal, light bulbs, mechanical and sentimental artefacts, in which Albanese finds the sense of a redemption, of a futuristic utopia from which melancholy is not excluded, perfectly fused with vital energy.
Both Albanese and Celestini will be there on Friday 14 June at 5:00 pm, in the “Lea Mattarella” Great Hall of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, to once again recount the secrets and inspirations of this story marked by a thousand voices and a thousand stories, already sold out at the Teatro Bibiena in Mantua, on 5 September 2018, the opening day of the Festivaletteratura, and then at Sala A in Via Asiago, in Rome, for the Radio Rai theatre festival “Tutto esaurito!”, and again hosted at the macro Asilo, at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Ravenna, at the Piccolo Festival della Parola in Noci, in Puglia.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/281812303
The book is a platform for experimentation, a narrative in two voices: Albanese gives new form and logic to his enchanted objects and Celestini translates them into words, weaving fantastic events around them, retrieving their biographies, transforming them into people. An ode to that “army of the homeless”, which is a pile of marginal sediments, residues from a well or a landfill, worn-out, broken, irregular bodies. Without harmony or discipline. Everything that is not needed and that society rejects. But which can find breath, acceptance, new life. And the game of metaphor becomes swift: men as things, and vice versa.
“There are no mute objects, only deaf people who cannot listen to them,” says Ascanio. “And Giovanni walks in the midst of this cemetery of the present. He talks to the dead of his Spoon River.”. A cemetery, in fact, which, like that of Edgar Lee Masters – set in the memories of the American Midwest and in the Olympus of contemporary literature – resounds with the lives and passions of citizens who have become ghosts, epitaphs, photographs. Yet, in the silence of the woods and valleys, those dead return from their “elsewhere” and put themselves back on the line of history: it is the poetic word that resurrects them, makes them voice and vision, returns them to the world, like verses to continue to be recited, commented on, staged, interpreted.
Albanese and Celestini are looking for a similar opportunity, in their respective professional adventures and in this intelligent, inspired collaboration. Another possibility for all the derelict objects, for all the shipwrecked stories and the social rejects, setting aside the current idea of obsessive competitiveness, hypertrophic perfectionism, a vitalism that has forgotten the mortal horizon and that has become, deceptively, a neurosis of artifice and a feeble illusion of power. There now seems to be no room left for error, fragility, the sense of the end, the absence of a centre, subversion, betrayal of the norm and the importance – including formative importance – of falling, of surrender. But that is not the case. Philosophically, it is already a bold twentieth-century perspective: to be without place, without purpose, between the principle of difference and the violence of bodies without organs, disjointed and fluid. It is from here that a virtuous shift originates, a possible aesthetic refoundation and recombination of the planes. An idea of salvation, in a certain sense.
“All these characters,” Ascanio said in an interview with Ansa – “are not going anywhere. We always want to be like those who get somewhere, like Ronaldo, like footballers, like the greats of history, but instead we should be a little more aware of how much we are like the homeless who don’t get anywhere. And then even the Supermen are a bit homeless”.. This is certainly true of the broken and resurrected objects that Albanese rescues from a fate of indifference or destruction, and which he entrusts to a creative gesture that is as enthusiastic as it is measured and subtle. And within these crazy catalogues there are human, psychological and existential cues, references to war, politics, the sacred, play, tradition and everyday life. The challenge of an artist “always moved by the incessant miracle of the birth and death of all things”, as Vincenzo Cerami said with affectionate precision, “capable of singing the praises of beauty by moving among leftovers and scraps, and searching with his eyes for the presence of a surviving animating spirit”.
– Helga Marsala