Romeo Castellucci La Vita Nuova

In 2018, at the invitation of La Monnaie, Bozar and Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Romeo Castellucci brought his carte blanche in Brussels to a close with the creation of a site-specific work entitled, La Vita Nuova. From the overturned car to decorative art, this latest performance celebrates his radical desire to bring art to life for what it is: human.

The Castelluccian experience is always shrouded in mystery, and not to be missed. In La Vita Nuova, we are plunged into a non-space, outside of time, given over to its own raw truth. The experience is as beautiful as it has ever been… the industrial soundscape, pushed to saturation point, and the various sounds ranging from the ghostly to nature; the car and the other, fleeting, ephemeral image it conjures up; the gestures of the “shepherds”, the embodiment of their physical effectiveness and their symbols in equal measure; and Claudia Castellucci’s “almost ritualist” poem, manifesting itself during the brusque returns to the real. This is its core. There is nothing futile in this progressive slide towards a form of “realism”. It enables us to perceive both the human community and history of art. On the contrary, what Castellucci gives us is the minute construction of a gesture as the work itself: the gesture by which man brings art to life; and the gesture by which the craftsman or woman renders man less of a stranger in his own world. Here we find the aspirations of the German philosopher Ernest Bloch, in The Spirit of Utopia (1918). Aspirations for another world, which has finally become human. Romeo Castellucci reminds us of this search, and his craftsman-like, ever curious way of going about it is what makes his work so compelling.
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Estimated running time : 55 min.