VALENTINA PALMI

Who are the Great Free? 

 

In a society like contemporary Western society which, with its imperative 'LIVE!', imposes the standard of eternal beauty and eternal youth, the Great Freedmen - in Vale Palmi's interpretation - are the Suicides, the subversives of the System, those who consciously decide to pursue the only true, absolute Freedom - Death - by self-determination.

 

Free from the impositions that accept as the only possible 'end-life' the 'natural', biological one. 

Free from the process of accumulation that has led to the transition from the concept of life to that of capital-life and to a quantitative evaluation of existence. 

Free from the social control that from birth (birth-control) to death (death-control) claims to dispose of our lives. 

 

The Great Free claim and reappropriate their right to life and death; suicide, therefore, as subversion of that ideology which forbids any subtraction of capital and value, where every human life is understood, precisely, as a particle of capital.

 

In the performance, the descending movement of the suicides alternates with the ascending movement of the artist who is the spokesman of their requests; slow, reflexive movements, made up of expectations and subtext: the bodies remain suspended in mid-air; the moment of impact is omitted from the viewer's sight, only revealed in the finale through an epiphany made up of sound and light.