SHOWS

They are playing a game. They are playing not playing a game. If I show them that I see them playing, I will break the rules and they will punish me. I have to play their game, not to see that I see the game. - Ronald Laing

My city is a virtual backdrop framing the farcical ballet of my country. A stage country in which policemen, mafiosi, citizens, politicians, recommended and upstanding spectators are conniving actors in an autistic pochade, some pretending to be what they are not, some pretending to believe the unreliable performance.

What if policemen disguised as thugs accidentally shot and killed you? What if those policemen disguised as thugs were actual killers in the pay of cosa nostra? What if cosa nostra was itself hired by the neo-fascist right wing to participate in a coup alongside (deviant?) bodies of the state? What if that coup attempt had been subsidized by businessmen funding politicians from the anti-fascist constitutional arc?

Retablo's performance is based on an episode that actually happened to the author-actor who performs it and who recounts it as follows: “A bullet intersected the path of my sixteen years of age: grim and badly dressed men-with gangster make-up and wigs-shot at eye level at a young boy, seriously risking accidentally hitting me at the very moment I was about to emerge from an alley. As in a violent scene from an action movie, the shady figures savagely beat the teenager they had fired at, loaded him into the car and seized him before my eyes. I randomly buzzed the first door I found within range and asked them to call the police. “They are the police,” recites, as in a scripted line, a lady as she descends from the steps of the church. “It was a performance,” she intends to tell me: they were policemen pretending to be criminals and that we, as good audiences, should have suspended our disbelief and pretended, in turn, to believe the dramaturgy of that performance to be true. Years later, it was ascertained that a couple of those policemen, pretend kidnappers, were real, hired assassins of the Santapaola family: mafiosi, pretend policemen, playing the part of mafiosi. That is, of what they actually were.

An unrepresentable representation had entirely occupied the collective life that manifested itself already represented. A few hundred meters from that little street, exactly ten years earlier, in the days of the Mexico 70 World Cup, the elite of the cosa nostra met for about 20 days to decide whether or not to participate in the coup d'état, fortunately then failed, organized by the former commander of the X Mas of the Italian Social Republic Junio Valerio Borghese. I was 10 years old when I bumped into Luciano Liggio while running in pursuit of that child - who 10 years later would be shot by policemen disguised as thugs - who had just snatched from my hands a bunch of soccer player cards from the 1969 - 1970 championship.”