OLEANDRI
By Tommaso Petrolo
with Raffaella Appià and Sil Marti
To have known so much love and to have endured
To be embittered and to think of you
To feel your moods like the weather and no longer let them strike me
To get angry and know what you are talking about
To fear being exploited
To fear being used
To fear staying poor forever
To fear ending up on the other side of a border
To fear imprisonment
To fear the witch-hunters and their generals
To want to lift you, gracefully, out of gravity
And to be told it isn't clear
To feel like a failure, to stop trying
To change the subject, to prefer not to speak
To laugh, to joke,
To ask new friends an old question that haunts me
Do you believe one can love unconditionally?
To want to run
To want to hide
To want to speak
To die of pride
To die of pride
OLEANDRI
by Tommaso Petrolo
with Raffaella Appià e Sil Marti
Running time 45 minutes
A project by PROTEO ETSThere comes a time when you disappear from the scene: you are no longer ‘prey’, no longer of interest to other people's eyes.It may sound like a stereotype, a caricature, but there is something ancestral that is hard to erase, even in societies like ours, where women act, work, seduce and conquer. The relationship with the “object of desire” is not only about power but also about mutual longing, and so it is hard to escape the other's expectations.It is a time when a woman finds herself thrown off balance: she is no longer seen the way she was used to. The intrusive gaze of the other disappears. The chorus that accompanied you falls silent, and no aesthetic effort seems able to bring it back. The age of invisibility has begun.Change does not follow time alone, nor can it be reduced to biological mutation. Love, grief, illness, war, accidents, great disappointments are transformative experiences that call into question who we are, who we were and who we are no longer. We are homeostatic creatures, surviving by trying to find a new balance after every fracture.The discovery of hormones was not enough to understand the female body. Ignorance is hard to defeat because, throughout the history of medicine, there has been a single model of the human body, and it is male, while the woman is an imperfect version of it. Female identity is therefore marked at its very