Thirty Two Giulia is a live documentary on the transformation of contorted obsessions, desires, impulses and memories, in orderly architecture.The protagonist finds herself on a refined set, where everything is customized and everything is revealed through opaque and fragile logics and meanings. A personality always subject to processes of rupture, abandonment and seduction, tending to a discontinuity closer to the flow of existence than to the logic of causality.
Thirty Two Giulia is a highly evocative solo performance that reflects upon the repercussions of late capitalism in western, contemporary society, crystallised inside a female body in an almost clinical space.
Marked by a simple set design, the solo performer, Jessica Matheson, wanders through different theatrical materials to recollect memories, narratives and information. The space is primarily white but a few distinct black details are graphically cracking up an apparent blank landscape. In this disrupted blankness the viewer is invited to project inside and finish the story. The work never appears like a dictation of facts, that tend to educate the spectator, how it has become prominent inside the contemporary western theatre space and social media platforms.
Rather than that, it triggers the spectator to situate his/her/their own reference points, sensation and emotions inside this unsettling yet calm landscape and time zone. Time seems to stand still and yet expands, inside of this performance that equals a momentum, frozen under a microscopic lens to understand what happens, what has happened and what may happen.
To sculpt such a momentum of a performance, Papetti is offering several entrances into her work, which operate on the level of poetics and allow for a layered state of experience within its reading and interpretation. One uni dimensional space thus enfolds layers and switches of perspective from within. The style of performance of Jessica Matheson asks the audience to contribute attention in such concentrated manner, that the viewer becomes an actively receiving agent in time itself, in a “now”. By making the “now” a such tangible quality to experience, the spectator’s body is co emerging with the uncovering of each scene, material, sound and plot twist.
The research of materials plays an essential role. Papetti explores the potential of different substances in contact, for history and materiality. Squid ink, chalk, water, paint. All of these explored in their transformative potential, like the offer of the complete performance-experience itself towards the viewer.
The work exists beyond the theatrical space. The research is based on how the character and the material can escape from a fixed and conventional space, thus arriving in a gallery space, public space and so on. The interest lies precisely in metamorphosing and thinning the spatial barriers.
