The theme of the Angel, of Walter Benjamin's Angelus novus, runs through the meeting with Daniele Villa, director of the play that won the Ubu 2022 Prize as "best performance of the year".
Benjamin's angel is an angel who flies with his gaze turned to the past, with his back to the future: the rubble of buildings and ideologies piles up before his eyes. The angel would like to stop and recompose the debris, but a storm swells its wings and drags it inexorably forward: this storm is what we call progress.
The question that emerges from Sotterraneo's work is whether it is still possible for us to recompose the brokenness produced by modernity, to construct that "image in which what has been is united lightning-fast with the now in a constellation", thus producing an innovation and a transformation of the linear and ever-equal time of history?
