Funded in 2015 by Nicola Borghesi, Enrico Baraldi and Paola Aiello, Kepler-452’s activity focuses on two main axes. On the one hand, the urgency of targeting a specific audience aged between 20 and 30 through shows, festivals, exhibitions and workshops. On the other hand, the Company intends to investigate and stage the lives of non-professionals (otherwise called “world-actors”) by glorifying their identities. Il Capitale (Das Kapital) is an investigation into the relationship between workplaces and workers: factories and redundant workers, agricultural crops and labourers, riders in large cities and many other types of workers. Accomplices of this new work are the 1263 pages of Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s manifesto: “A work without which our daily life would probably be very different”, say Kepler-452. For the artistic collective, it seems that the time has come to face the reinterpretation of Marx’s thought; his theories have conditioned generations of readers and academics, and are a dialectical source of inspiration still alive today. The goal is to re-read Das Kapital by putting it in dialogue with today’s political mechanisms; to bring out the relationship between Marx’s words and reality by giving space to the intimate dimension of the voices met in the research.
Kepler-452 was born in 2015 in Bologna out of the meeting between Nicola Borghesi, Enrico Baraldi, Paola Aiello and, on the organizational side, first Michela Buscema, followed by Roberta Gabriele in 2021.
Since its inception, the company has cultivated an ambition, a desire, an urgency: to open the doors of theaters, to go out, to observe what lies outside its threshold through the lens of the stage, guided by the unshakable belief that reality has an autonomous dramaturgical force that is just waiting to be pulled onto the stage. The theatrical formats created by Kepler-452 range from the onstage biography-based involvement of non-professionals (or world- actors, as we prefer to call them, because they carry worlds within which stand apart from the ones created on stage), to theatrical reportages that transform investigations of reality into performative moments, to the creation of audio-guided itineraries and other devices for interaction with urban space, to the production of the 20 30 Festival that, launched in 2014, has brought several hundred performers under-30 to the stage in an attempt to outline a generational tableau. In 2018 Kepler-452 teamed up with Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale and this led to the 2018 production Il Giardino dei ciliegi - Trent’anni di felicità in comodato d’uso in which Chekhov’s prose meets an eviction story that really took place in Italy in 2015. It was awarded the 2018 Critical Network Award. F. Perdere le cose debuted at VIE Festival in 2019 and tells the story of an undocumented migrant who, according to Italian law, cannot take the stage. 2022 sees the debut of Il Capitale - Un libro che ancora non abbiamo letto, in which Marx’s seminal text takes form through the voices and bodies of a group of workers from Florence’s GKN, a company whose employees were all laid off via email in July 2019.
For the Ustica Memorial Museum, in 2019, the theater company produced È assurdo pensare che gli aerei volano in an attempt to reconstruct the biographies of some of the victims of the crash involving the DC-9 aircraft in 1980. From 2017 it has also staged several editions of Comizi d’amore, a participatory on-stage format that delves into the lives and ideas of certain local communities by posing the same questions once formulated by Pasolini in his namesake documen- tary. In 2021, Comizi d’amore was the opening performance of FIBA, Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, in a special remotely directed edi- tion during lockdown.
Kepler-452 have also worked on a long series of audio-guided itineraries entitled Lapsus Urbano, which explore urban spaces in an attempt to over- turn the everyday notion we have of cities. During the pandemic, the company offered several “interstitial” formats, driven by the desire to dialogue with restrictions and not give up on theater at a time when this was seemingly impos- sible: Lapsus Urbano // Il primo giorno possibile is an audio-guided journey in which the distance between the spectators - alongside the memo- ries of the first lockdown - is the founding theme of the performance while Consegne - Spedizioni notturne per città deserte and Coprifuoco are two pandemic theater experiments in which an actor disguised as a rider attempts a delivery to a spec- tator disguised as a recipient. In 2020 the company received the “Asini” award, given by the namesake magazine directed by Goffredo Fofi, for its many achievements. In May 2021 the company debuted with Gli Altri. Indagine sui nuovissimi Mostri - a performance grounded in social media and online hate featuring dramatur- gy by Riccardo Tabilio and Nicola Borghesi, who also appeared as the solo performer.
In 2022 the company won the Daily Bread call for Stronger Peripheries, gaining access to a series of residencies between Italy and Hungary. During the same year, while strolling down the corridors of his habitual theater hang-outs, Nicola Borghesi crosses paths with Enzo Vetrano and Stefano Randisi, a historic artistic couple who are the beating heart of a theatrical tradition that is both ancient and contemporary. This chance encoun- ter throws off a strange, ineffable spark: their co-produced show Grazie della squisita prova premieres in July 2022, as part of the Radicondoli Festival.
