Congiura

Stefano Ricci

Congiura is a new theatre production that moves through old age as a territory of resistance, lucidity and survival. Not as a theme or demographic category, but as an existential and political condition: the condition of a body that continues to exist once the world no longer acknowledges it. The project emerges from a reflection on the relationship between time, body and memory, on what happens when the illusion of infinite possibility begins to fracture and accumulated experience no longer corresponds to social recognition. Within this rupture, a fragile yet radical space opens up, one in which the subject is no longer called upon to produce.

On stage, five women in their seventies occupy the space. Their presence is not representation. Their bodies, marked by the passing seasons, become measure, threshold and living matter. They do not offer a narrative but a shared duration. They do not ask for attention: they claim it through the very fact of their existence.

Loosely inspired by “Mine-Haha” by Frank Wedekind, Congiura overturns the very idea of education. No longer young girls being trained for the future, but mature women unlearning obedience to decline. The stage becomes a space for re-education in the present, a place where the simplest actions — standing, breathing, working, waiting — regain density and meaning.

Manual labour, repetition, fatigue and silence become language. In a time dominated by immateriality and speed, Congiura insists on the reality of body and spirit, on their imperfection and their tenacity.

There is no nostalgia in this project, nor any celebration. There is no pity. Congiura rejects the rhetoric of endings and dismantles the aesthetics of erasure that consign old age to the margins of visibility. To speak of the time that remains, today, is a profoundly political act.

The title itself alludes to a collective and secret undertaking: a conspiracy in the original sense of the word — con spiracy / cum spirare — to breathe together. A silent alliance between bodies that share a condition and choose to make it visible, without asking permission.

After years of research into the body as image, as surface of desire or site of sacrifice, Congiura marks an inverse movement: a return to the residual organism, non-spectacularised and non-functional, and precisely for this reason irreducibly political. A body that does not represent an ending, but its own legitimate truth.

Congiura is an act of presence.
A gesture of resistance.
An invitation to observe what endures.

Stefano Ricci