Romeo Castellucci Genesi : from the museum of sleep
directed by the author

Presentation :


Fragments of beginnings by Romeo Castellucci


I. At the beginning

Genesis begins with us, the moderns, originally. We're in Vienna, the heart of civilised Europe, in the rooms of the Academy of Science.
Marie Curie has just discovered radioactivity. The art of manipulative scientists who play with matter like playing life on a pistol shot. Lucifer is here, in full ceremonial regalia and top hat, the first to come and pay tribute. Lucifer makes a speech to man, repeats the first words of God, the very first, those of Genesis, those which gave birth to the world. His inordinately long hands deliver the words of God, to God delivered. Words give birth to matter. And now matter, thanks to radium, has become the God's equal, it creates in itself its own energy. Bearer of light, the very name of Lucifer.

He leaves his lectern, his vesture. The space nudifies, like him, Lucifer, long and thin like his hands. He now goes through the narrow door, accompanied by a terrible noise. He is Adam, Lucifer, the first man, the first to create a world from the world, for good and for evil. For the tree of knowledge, the one the man in the Garden of Eden was not to approach, we forget its real name too often: the tree of good and evil.

Adam can begin to people his desert, generations of monsters and dried cadavers. The ordeal can begin: the body of man is beaten and folds, curved and capable of all amputations as long as life continues, the tree of eternal life is the second tree in paradise, we often forget this. And nothing in the Bible says that man touched it. The body bends and twists, but holds on, full of life, desperately alive.


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II. Auschwitz

Dressed in long white tunics with cowls, the children play in a large, light room, the soft fabrics waving in the wind. There is a gentle breeze. Gentleness, calm, apparently, unless it's only a lull. Or the false intimacy of an already stolen childhood, ready to be sacrificed to men.

Behind the veil, the smooth coldness of a clinical world breaks through. A world where life no longer counts at all. Here the purpose is not to save lives, but to analyse their anatomy. In the depths of the room, a new Adam Lucifer, invisible, has got it into his head to become God again. He removes the organs of children to manufacture eternal life. Eternity for the executioners.

During this time, the children continue to play in the big white room. We hear the calm voice of Luis Mariano. They play with the accessories of children (which are also those of the drama of the adults): the miniature sitting-room, the little goods train, top hats, rabbits ears. Suddenly, the stage changes colour. The softness becomes cruel: the children point to the guilty one, the emissary responsible for all the evil, to have his throat cut like a chicken. A bag on his head. The piercing cries of the dead child. Paw, Claw of the devil. The unbearable echo of the child put to death in the cold room of children who are going to die. Silence. There's still just a voice. It's not Luis Mariano any more. It's Antonin Artaud: I'm not crazy, I'm not delirious, I'm not
Black. White. Curtain.


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III. Cain and Abel

Return to the earth, red, human, made of peat and sweat. Return to the circular earthly movements of the living, if they are still living, the two men coming forward. In their bodies live ancient beginnings, geneses of life and of death, received and given. In their bodies, the words of Auschwitz probably vibrate, even if they don't know it. Now they dance in the arena of their forthcoming coronation, one against the other, one or the other, only. They don't know it.

They have ancient names, they're brothers. He's Cain, he's Abel. The cultivator and the nomad, enemies, we say, the Bible says: the earth and the animal. Two distinct sources of life, equal. Cain wanted everything, the fields and the herds. Cain kills his brother, cursed, he is doomed to restless wandering. Among men, since this time, a journey is seen as evil, the incarnation of all evils: exiles, banishments, deportations, flights, losses. Cain didn't see that freedom was in him. Not in the other one. Cain's arm wasn't sensitive enough to touch his own liberty. Cain made his wasted arm the arm of all his crimes. Abel his brother died suffocated by the weakness of his brother, Cain, the crowned winner who loses everything. Genesis perhaps of a possible justice: completely lost as he is now, beneath the regard of the dogs of the town, Cain lies down on the dead body of his brother, the only bed that holds him up.

Genesi, geneses (possible) of man: knowledge, power, wandering. Dream, calculation, sacrifice. Wealth, fighting, embraces. And all the other fruit of the still unknown tree.


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