TIME OF METAMORPHOSIS

“Marks of pain trace countless fine lines through history” Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald

The story of the silkworm’s metamorphosis, its commercialization and its spreading around the world, raises questions about man’s ability to change, about the patterns manifested repeatedly in the infinite diversity of phenomena.
This story about a wonderful, mysterious ability to morph, transforms into a story about systems of domestication, exploitation, enslavement and extermination.
The performance moves between alternating layers: documentation of the metamorphosis of the silkworms we have been growing, a chapter from W. G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” *, scenes following Chekhov’s characters’ desperate struggle for change, harsh news items and photographs from last year’s local newspapers.
The work raises critical questions from the field of Biopolitics: the relationship between the ruling body and the subjected one, and the ability of mechanisms of power to supervise, dominate and narrow down human life according to their preferences.
We tried to examine the dimensions of the destructiveness of absolute power, but also our possibility to trace lines of escape
*DIE RINGE DES SATURN © Eichborn AG, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, All rights reserve