Nannetti, le colonel astral

POWERFUL, graceful and beautiful.

Every day, Oreste Fernando Nannetti (1927 - 1994) engraved texts on the facades of the psychiatric hospital in Volterra (Italy) where he was interned. The words, traced in stone using the buckle of his waistcoat, stretch 70 metres across the walls of the hospital courtyard. It's an open-air mural that reveals an astonishing world, somewhere between dream and reality, science and imagination.
Convinced that he is connected to supernatural and cosmic presences, Nannetti poetically
recreates his exchanges with the interstellar universe, as well as with the earth and its entrails.
This colossal work has been the subject of several exhibitions, and all his texts have been
deciphered, transcribed and translated by the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne.
For this show, Gustavo Giacosa has created a dramaturgy based on this graffiti and letters
written or supposedly written by Nannetti. Letters addressed to members of his family but
never sent, recounting the daily experience of his imprisonment.
In the form of a solar clown, Giacosa takes over Nannetti's body. He transcends it,
microphone in hand, sometimes dancing, sometimes languid, borrowing his lightness from
cabaret. Fausto Ferraiuolo's jazz piano dialogues with him, and his free, generous music
seems to want to tame the violence that sometimes escapes from this uncontrollable animal.
The silent violence of Nannetti's gesture is extended on stage through the intrinsic musicality
of his poetic words, which manifest themselves beyond words. This musicality gives a unique
scansion and expression to Nannetti's chaotic deluge of 'raw', syntax-free words. A video projection plunges the viewer into the abandoned corridors and courtyard of the Volterra psychiatric hospital, where Nannetti engraved the pages of his mural book. More than thirty years after the closure of psychiatric hospitals in Italy, these images are the last testimony to Nannetti's work. Giacosa/Ferraiuolo create a poetic, choreographic and musical show that pays tribute to the creative dazzle of this extraordinary artist. It's a formidable work, full and powerful, that will leave a lasting impression on us all.