Backstage Intro

Opera Opera’s journey through art, theatre, and life begins at Backstage, which expands from being a scenic space forming part of theatre architecture to incorporate the conceptual nuances of being behind the scenes. The Backstage gallery therefore offers a reflection on the themes of space and history, memory and the archive.

The architectural forms of Italian theatres designed by Renzo Piano, Michele Sacripanti, Francesco Venezia, and Aldo Rossi—whose theatres are the place of places, the quintessence of architecture—interpret the request for a space for representation by giving life to iconic elements or the city or by generating signs in the natural landscapes, in any case dynamic centers, forges of hypotheses and creativity, capable of renewing culture and politics itself.

Scenic architecture is challenged and overturned in the vision of Giorgio Andreotta Calò, whose work La fine del mondo raises questions about reflection and the representation of reality, while theatrical space is subverted by the experiments of The Living Theatre, where the boundary between stage and stalls is removed and the world becomes the backstage of a performance that fuses art and life together.

Architectural space is also what structures Armin Linke’s photographic vision in his Il Corpo dello Stato, featuring places of power designed to stage decision-making rituals, a kind of backstage where the representation of reality is formulated.

Ordenarz materials such as electric cables and light bulbs, objects belonging to the operative and hidden imagery of the backstage, are charged thanks to Michelangelo Pistoletto with an aesthetic and emotional intensitz in his historical work Quadro di fili elettrici.

At the center of the gallery, Luca Vitone’s Sonorizzare il luogo (Grand Tour) takes us on a musical journey through the regions of Italy. It is a collection of coral memory made up of sounds, places, and cultures that spreads out and intertwines with itself in the space.

To conclude, we have Fabio Mauri’s historical work Senza ideologia, which uses archive material to recall dark moments in European history, illuminating the dark side of the totalitarian ideology.