Teatro Mundi

Teatro Mundi is made up of fixed shots filmed in several cities and countries (Athens, Genoa, Belle-Ile-en-mer, Arles, New York, Marrakech, Tokyo, Venice, Timimoun Algeria, the Egyptian white desert) which present multiple realities (cities, seas, deserts) in both images and sounds.

The film begins with a view of the Theatre of Dionysus, on the site of the Acropolis in Athens. This place is considered the first theatre in the world, the cradle of tragedy. From this shot, by superimposition, the different geographical realities of the places travelled through will appear. Italian traffic will emerge from the ancient theatre, the Atlantic Ocean will engulf the city of Genoa, or the red Moroccan earth will sweep over the New York megalopolis, and so on. So many associations to find a contemporary perspective on the ancient concept of Theatrum mundi (theatre of the world), probably still operative today.

This notion, developed by many Baroque authors in the 15th and 16th centuries (Shakespeare, Calderon, Corneille or Goldoni), depicts the world as a theatre in which all beings play a role in spite of themselves. They are reduced to puppets whose strings are pulled by a “creator” with the double figure of a “God” and a director. Today, in our globalised world, the ancient theatrum mundi finds a new resonance. The traditional figure of the demiurge has been replaced by a director possessed by economics and progress, and by an angry planet nature.

The film Teatro Mundi offers a rereading of this concept and invites us to reconcile these two dimensions, in order to write new roles, fair and moderate, for the characters of our world stage.

The premiere of Teatro Mundi will be shown at the Galerie Analix Forever, in Geneva, in December-January 2022-23.