talkCloe Piccoli and Beatrice MarchiI Profumati dell’Aquila & The Friends

Discovering one of the most unusual and intriguing bands we have ever seen and heard

Prelude to the new performance I profumati dell’Aquila & The Friends the conversation presents the existential musical band The Friends, a group of characters invented and impersonated by Beatrice Marchi herself and by performers exploring contemporary identities, aspirations, emotions, fears and desires. They include characters such as Loredana the woman with shrimp hands, wild seductive curls and a special talent for music, as well as Katie Fox a wicked and treacherous but ultimately lonely and melancholic ex-bully, Mafalda, Susy Culinski, and many others.

We saw them in different stories, in performances, films, paintings and concerts, on show at the Fondazione Prada and the Istituto Svizzero in Milan. It is as if these characters were accompanying us in an open, intriguing storytelling, inspired by Greek mythology and Breaking Bad, by David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, by literature and comics, by Rihanna’s musci. And now in L’Aquila The Friends meet a new collective character, I Profumati dell’Aquila: there are 30 people but they are one, they are a chorus but also individual people. They are the most recent piece in Beatrice Marchi’s mythology made up of characters, masks and disguises, sounds and reverberations, Dionysian rites, cathartic experiences, incursions into the discovery of hybrid, fluid and disturbing identities, split between electronic devices, algorithms, human (and animal) bodies, images and, perhaps, deep down, a powerful emotional sphere.