performanceFabio MauriChe cosa è il fascismo. Festa in onore del generale Ernst Von Hussel di passaggio per Roma
Istituto di Istruzione Superiore “Amedeo D’Aosta”
Via Acquasanta, 5 – L’Aquila
free admission until capacity
booking is mandatory – available soon
duration: variable, approximately 60 minutes
After almost 30 years, the reenactment of the historic performance in which the artist explores fascism’s seductive power over the audience as its accomplice.
“Here, in a short space of time, one experiences the false ideology, the abyss of institutionalised superficiality, the tautology of absolute power, the intimate malice of the lie hidden within order, the shame of cultural confusion, the irresponsibility of those who usurp the freedom of collective judgement, and the deception of youth, which brings grace and trust to serve as a prelude to every massacre of its own making.”
Fabio Mauri wrote this in the programme distributed in Rome on the evening of 2 April 1971, when this performance was staged for the first time. Admission was by invitation only. Cards of different colours indicated the stand where to sit, simultaneously assigning each participant a social status: authorities, public figures, academics, magistrates, family members, rural folk, the Italian press, the foreign press, construction workers, and Jews.
Dressed in Fascist uniforms and singing ‘Giovinezza’, the second and third-year students of the Silvio D’Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome guided the large audience to take their seats in the stands surrounding a red platform bearing a black swastika in the centre, the ‘Piazza d’Armi’, where the gymnastic displays and debates on Fascist mysticism were to take place in honour of General Ernst von Hussel, represented – not without irony – by a wax mannequin dressed in full dress uniform, seated at the centre of the officials’ stand.
The performance was modelled on the ‘ludi juveniles’ held in Florence during Hitler’s visit in 1938, in which Mauri took part, alongside his friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, as part of the Bologna team. Thus came into being the first of what Mauri termed ‘complex actions’, bringing the theme of ideology to the stage for the first time – a theme that would strongly characterise all his subsequent work.
