bleak Romantic perception of the end of the world
In 2020 madalena reversa undertook a long and intense research on 1816, the Year Without Summer, of which Manfred represents the last landing. The Year Without a Summer in 1816 - was caused by the Tambora Mount eruption in Indonesia in 1815, which influenced the climate patterns throughout the globe, leading to a global cooling. The research focused on the copious poetic production of young English Romantics, which arose in the heart of the climate crisis of 1816 and in close connection with various ecocritical readings by scholars of the Environmental Humanities.
The young Romantics knew nothing about Tambora but the perceptive experience led them to write about Nature and to contemplate the world that was changing around them, expressing ideas and concerns extremely connected to our contemporary environmental issues.
madalena reversa's research creates a 200-year-long bridge, characterized yesterday and today by a shared feeling, in the terrain of a common geological era, the Anthropocene. Manfred was born within the creative forge of 1816 and it is by its nature the most extreme act. In Manfred Anthropocene seems to be at the edge of its decline, where besides to the climate crisis and the environmental catastrophe there’s the epidemic uncertainty expanding in every field of existence.
Manfred is the last ritual of a humanity consumed by itself, the agent of an obsessive, corrupt, scarred relationship with Nature.
Manfred embodies the spirit of our age in the disgust, in the aesthetic indigestion, in the grief, in the irremediable love, in the solid despair, and quoting T. Morton, in the “cogito ridden by anguish”.
madalena reversa is an artistic project founded in 2016 by the directors, dramaturgs, actors and performers Maria Alterno and Richard Pareschi. In 2015 they obtained the BA Hons in Acting from the University of Wales. They attended workshops with Romeo Castellucci, Emma Dante, Chiara Guidi, Tage Larsen, Agrupación Señor Serrano, Claudia Castellucci. Their research is focused on the aesthetic and emotional power of lights, sounds, objects, bodies becoming horizon for compositions and atmospheres which find place at the intersection between performing and visual arts.
Their projects involve artists from different backgrounds such as actors, performers, film directors, photographers.
