Vanessa Beecroft makes a new performance at Cinecittà: a tribute to the women of Rome

In Rome, Cinecittà was the theater for the new performance by Vanessa Beecroft, who accepted the invitation of Chiara Sbarigia, president of Cinecittà s.p.a., to create a site-specific performance starring the women of Rome. The action, titled VB93, was held last Oct. 1, from 6 to 9 p.m., at Teatro5 and was part of Cinecittà’s new cultural project, which aims to enhance its heritage, spaces and activities, with a view to making it increasingly an active artistic hotbed in multiple directions.

VB93 proposed a reflection on the very construction of the artist’s performances, with a look capable of spanning through her entire production, from 1993 to 2021, in search of a socio-political response on the theme of the feminine and feminism. In homage to the world of cinema that hosts the event, VB93 Performance’s first subject of reference is precisely the Jeanne Moreau of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, chosen as the emblem of a generation of women who have lived their existence silently, without the power of speech.

The performance in Cinecittà’s Teatro5, Federico Fellini’s most beloved, takes place in a space that exceeds the specificity of Rome: an ideal, abstract and metaphysical place, like that of film production. The process of the realization of the performance, which has never been filmed before, is thus documented in all its aspects precisely in film form, particularly in the relationship with the performance’s protagonists: the women from the neighborhoods of Rome whom Vanessa Beecroft interviews during casting. Women who live in the suburbs, but also in the more central neighborhoods of the capital. The aim is to narrate through the experience of this event all that, over the years, Beecroft’s previous performances have aimed to represent on the themes of female psychology, beauty, violence, and the relationship with the body.

“I realized,” Sbarigia said, “that the heritage of the Archivio Luce, the linchpin of Cinecittà’s cultural system, with its hundreds of thousands of photographs and films, needed to be enriched with new acquisitions, particularly on the vertical of current events and especially on that of the female gaze, which has been totally absent until now. Starting from this principle, I thought of inviting on the project an artist of international caliber such as Vanessa Beecroft. Although Vanessa’s interventions had mainly taken place in museums or deconsecrated churches, we tried to ask her to make a site-specific tableau vivant in Cinecittà: it would have been the crowning achievement of my female vertical, because Vanessa has always artistically questioned the theme of women’s bodies. I am also happy that the VB93 performance falls near the date of Caravaggio’s birth, because in Vanessa’s highly original art beats an ancient heart. Indeed, the deep roots of ’tableaux vivants’ are those of staging to which Caravaggio assigned great importance, as evidenced by several biographical accounts of the attention he paid to the choice and arrangement of models, since what excited him most was the way he framed the scene through light.”

The performance took place in a single three-hour act, and the action consisted of about 300 female performers who remained on stage for the entire duration. “For Rome,” Beecroft explained, “specifically I chose women ’on the margins’ of society, either because they were excluded when from the periphery or excluded because they belonged to an aristocracy that no longer has value; I wanted the women of Rome to be these, not just contemporary women. This did not necessarily happen, but it was my aspiration and I wanted a mass of these women.” The performance also included a live soundtrack, created to suggest a progression of time, from late night to mid-afternoon, though with departures to suggest an independence from the unfolding of the action.

The VB93 performance and its conception and realization process will become a documentary directed and produced at Beecroft herself, while some of the images will be acquired by the Luce Archive and will also be part of MIAC, the Cinecittà Museum of Cinema and Audiovisual.

Vanessa Beecroft makes a new performance at Cinecittà: a tribute to the women of Rome

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