"Ethica. Natura e origine della mente": a performance that suspends and triangulates light / body / mind

Abstract

That performance by Castellucci I participated in along with many other people back in 2019 sounds awkward today, as this pandemic present connects times. And "Ethica. Natura e origine della mente" demands thinking —from the viewpoint of Spinoza, Romeo and Claudia Castellucci— by placing ourselves in our time of interruptions and ceasing of usual movements. In this work of connections, I will try not to give in to the seriousness of the philosophical topic nor the incomprehension of certain signifiers, or the difficulty posed by the allegories that Romeo Castellucci mentions in interviews. This performance challenges us; it seems it would have anticipated the unusual experience of our bodies, which have been “hanging” for over a year in the vast world territory, swinging between listening to the language, to the howl, looking at the electric light, its blinks in the virtuality of screens, and feeling the ferocious animality of certain interactions. It is appealing to articulate the performance with the translation of the figures of the Light and the Camera, triangulating it with our uncertainties between life and death. “If the human body has been affected once by two or more bodies simultaneously, when the mind later imagines one of them, it will immediately remember the others” (Spinoza, Ethics, II, 2020: 133. Text in italics).