Interview | Giacomo Lilliù

Lidia De Nuzzo: Theater has always mirrored the foundations and contaminations of the society that writes it, how does the culture of meme and shitposting reflect, in the virtual space of social and the real space of the theatrical stage act, the mechanisms of relationship to space and to the other/other that characterize our contemporaneity. What prompted the decision to revive Carlo Goldoni’s writing by actualizing Le smanie per la Villeggiatura? How does it fit within your artistic research path?

Giacomo Lilliù: Interesting to me that you talk about theater as something written. “The theater has always been a contamination of the society that writes it”: I guess you mean that society writes the theater and this of writing as a theatrical tool is quite central to our performance insofar as we take as a starting point, point of access, if you will also as a pretext for our operation, Goldoni.

What Goldoni does with his historical reform is to propose, for the Italian paradigm, a model of text writing to go beyond the whimsy of the mask, of the performer, and to go programmatically inside the characters with theatre jokes concocted precisely to chase the verisimilitude.

In our work we are very clear about this operation that Goldoni does, that is, preferring a fluid work, with more performative than representational intent, even in the sense of pure entertainment, and in some ways we move against it. I do not want to dare to compare the adoption of the meme to a return to commedia dell’arte. However, it is true that the meme is a lightning-fast form of communication; it works the moment it creates a short-circuit of references that focus on and replay each other, a kind of semiotic lazzo if you will. It is precisely this firing of several neurons at once that makes the meme a machine that succeeds in propagating itself, perhaps even simply for the pleasure of hearing these different areas collapse within a single image with funny inscriptions.

Complexity does not necessarily equate to slowness. We position ourselves vis-à-vis the tool of shitposting and meming as being about how it is possible today to exist immersed in complexity and to try to understand it by simply being in it, breathing it in and navigating it, a bit like David Foster Wallace’s parable, where the old fish meets two young fish. The old fish says, “Good morning, how is the water today?” And one of the young fish looks at the other and says: “But what is water?” Almost as if memes are a manifestation of the fact that we breathe and feed on complexity now and that therefore perhaps even trying to unpack complexity into all the layers of meaning is itself a simplification of that complexity. Shitposting also consequently is, thought of precisely as a practice of derailing discourse. This fabric in which we are immersed, it comes to be said, is perhaps a form of reaction to the pervasive presence of narrative in everything we are fed, because by now narrative and communication have matched each other on all media spheres, that is.

This interview is part of the Backstage/Onstage editorial project that this year revolves around Intraspaces, or all those intrastitial spaces that connect technologies, artists, space, and spectators. In this regard, what is the origin of this process of fusion between different media and different modes of expression and in what perceptual field is the experience of the performance?

The fusion process stems from the fact that I don’t know how to make memes, but I have always found them very inspiring. There are those who resort to memes as a tool to update themselves about the world. I don’t know if I can say that I do the same. I certainly do sometimes learn about news just from memes. Beyond the news there is a very interesting form, although then “form” is a misnomer, a kind of trend that some meme creators have which is the so-called meme essay. Profiles like @avodacoibuprofen, @young_agamben, @lacanyewest (the latter of which is no longer active) are projects that use the language of internet culture to bring in lunges of reflection that are often very illuminating to me. It comes back to the complexity I was telling you about earlier, complexity in the sense that we can live in a world where, in social feeds as in analog life, with the superficial coexists the in-depth and then perhaps return to the superficial.

Regarding your question about the location of the perceptual space of experience, it is very difficult to give an unambiguous answer. We always give a dual mode to follow performance: come in presence, or follow only remotely, live digitally on Telegram. This creates a performance that actually does not have its own stable perceptual location. For me primarily, it is difficult to have the experience as a spectator in this work.

Social platforms, specifically this play Telegram, force us into a denatured performativity, which allows for the continuous writing of identity and content. How can this performativity be translocated and incorporated into the performativity of the theatrical artistic act? What are the elements and spaces of fusion and hybridization within contemporary theater in your artistic research?

First of all, I don’t really know if we can call Telegram a social, because Telegram is more of a messaging platform. It often happens that meme pages open channels on Telegram, but here’s the definition of Telegram as a social in my opinion may be improper, because precisely Telegram is in this middle space where nobody necessarily asks you to curate a profile. The important thing is that you produce content. Again with a performative nature that allows for not writing, but re-writing and continuous destabilization of a profile identity precisely because of a freer flow of content.

It is also true that, unfortunately or fortunately, thanks to this now endemic mode of the algorithms that govern social platforms, those who can present the strongest identity are the ones who have the most visibility and space on the same platforms. So even there it is difficult to talk properly about continuous identity and content writing in my opinion.

A lot has changed since the 1990s. There is a good friend of mine, the poet Davide Nota, who recalls for example in some of his works very clearly the sense of liberation that the first Internet chats of the 90s gave when all you had to do was choose a nickname and you could cross other crossed nicknames in the web space. They were liberating and untrapping masks; they remained in a magmatic and performative state, never having time to solidify into a second identity, rather inviting the opposite. It would be nice to recover that spirit.

There is no digital for me if there is no liveness coefficient; for all those performance experiments that go digital, it is inescapable. The performance, in our case, is always different every time. The script that we go to has, yes, parts that are written and predetermined, but many others arise from the interaction with the content that is created during the evening of the performance, and it is these that keep a performance more alive.

It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. We experienced this during rehearsals. We tried to structure a more rigid set list, to build a script, but we soon found that it didn’t work. Also, every time we do this show we adapt it to the context we are in. We have done it in very different situations, like the Mart Museum in Rovereto, which is radically different from the Pelanda theater. I am very happy that so far we have managed to baste the project with a modular cast, alternating number of performers and in-person and remote modes. For the first time, at Romaeuropa Festival, we will have the whole cast in presence at the same time and all memers connected. We will premiere the work in this specific version, which still remains hybrid, simultaneously remote and live, gravitating thematically also on the presence-absence relationship.

In view of the staging of The Million Dollar Theatropostage at Romaeuropa Festival 2024, how will the show temporarily rewrite the festival spaces and the relative way of traversing and experiencing them?

As I was telling you, this is the first time we have the opportunity to have the full cast, in-person and online. In this set-up we are just trying these days to see what the possibilities are for us. And I don’t want to anticipate too much.

For those coming to the in-person performance, they will need to bring their well-charged phone with the Telegram app downloaded; without it, it would be impossible to follow the performance in the darkness of the audience. The audience will be an integral part of the performance. Their phones, screens, notifications, ringer volume, the pace at which they choose to play the videos, the audios that will happen within the chat and create will be an important component of the performance, sometimes the most important. There will be times when the stage will be empty, and there all that is offered to the audience’s vision is nothing more than the micro cosmos of what is happening in the screen. I am very curious to see how all this will be configured at Pelanda. These things are never predictable.

Giacomo Lilliù. Il teatro postaggio da un milione di dollari, Digitalive. Romaeuropa Festival, La Pelanda, Rome 12.10. 2024 (10p.m.)