WHEN: Friday 3 May, 18:00
WHERE: At CM7 (Bergen, Christian Michelsens gate 7)
PRACTICAL: Free to attend, no registration
The performance ‘Roma-Baghdad 1984’ represents the final event of the SWAP program and Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini’s residency at Hordaland Kunstsenter.
Roma-Baghdad 1984 is based on the evocation of mourning in its dual essence, collective and personal. It is a story as private as it is common to every human being. The work on mourning as a possibility to reposition one’s shattered personality within a social context that, with or without the people we love, continues to move forward without giving us the opportunity to become aware of our presence. Roma-Baghdad 1984 is the story of two adoptive brothers, one Italian and one Iraqi, Emanuele and Majeed. It is the story told by the surviving brother, the one who denied and then ultimately understood and comprehended. This story, which can never be entirely singular, uses football as an expressive medium because football itself was the thing that always divided them. Roma-Baghdad 1984 begins with the final of the European Cup between A.S. Roma and Liverpool played at the Olympic Stadium in Rome in 1984, the year of the brothers’ birth. In that final, Roma lost on penalties. Ten years later, in 1994, when the two brothers meet for the first time, the captain of A.S Roma, Agostino Di Bartolomei, committed suicide. In this process of sorting out social and emotional events, penalties become the metaphor for the relationship between the two brothers but above all for death and its need for processing. If we cannot win, let’s bring the ball home. If we cannot overcome the pain, let’s find it a space next to us and celebrate it.
Curated by Amerigo Mariotti and Giorgia Tronconi of Adiacenze and Manuel Portioli