within Mappe del Nuovo Mondo

WOE/Wastage of Events is a hybrid work which takes place simultaneously in presence and on the streaming platform Twitch.
Inspired by the graphic novel The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James, it is the traverse of a polygonal desert transfigured by typical iconographies of the Digital Age. The title’s wastage of events is precisely this, the residue of a hyper-connected world caving in under an overload of inputs. Reality, whether virtual or not, remains an alien landscape to be processed by crossing it; but as in any waste land, the promise of a deluge is always on the horizon.

The scenic device sees at its centre a screen that, like a portal, opens onto a virtual reality where the human absence hovers over uninhabited places and scrapheaps. Around the screen stand three liminal figures: a performer in VR equipment, through whose eyes the exploration is carried out; a sound artist, playing scores for the changing environments; a speaker, whose distorted microphone voice lists file histories and digresses about memory. Occasionally, non-sequiturs break into his utterances. These are the messages left by online watchers on Twitch, reincorporated in the monologue through an improvised and unpredictable participatory mechanism, recycling and amassing the refuse of language.

The instrumentation overturns the stereotype of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. The VR visor allows one to see more things, the headphones to hear more precisely, the microphone to speak louder. However, enhanced as they are, the performers remain unable to alter that imperturbable virtual universe.
From this apparent irrelevance, the human and the technological merge into each other. They discover themselves to be similar insofar as they are both destined to record and analyse events – in other words, insofar as they are both entities founded on memory.

Giacomo Lilliù (1992) is a director and actor. After graduating at the School of the Teatro Stabile delle Marche and later at LAMDA in London, he has directed and participated in projects in Italy, Poland and the UK. Since 2014 he has collaborated with theatre company MALTE, directed by Sonia Antinori. As an actor he is directed by Marco Baliani, Ontroerend Goed, Romeo Castellucci. He directed and performed Teoria della classe disagiata (2021), official adaptation of the cult essay of the same name.
In 2015, he founded Collettivo ØNAR, an informal group which works between theatre and digital art that created projects such as bloomsday (2016), marathon of live-streamed happenings, and PPSS_Mosaico_020 (2021), an event realised via email correspondence and video calling, winner of Marche Palcoscenico Aperto. In 2022 the Fondo network, created by Santarcangelo dei Teatri together with 13 Italian partners, awards him a fellowship for his personal artistic research. He won the Residenze Digitali call in 2021, with WOE, and in 2023, with Il teatropostaggio da un milione di dollari, a research group on the collisions between performative and memetic languages curated with Pier Lorenzo Pisano.

concept, texts, direction, interpretation: Giacomo Lilliù
concept, 3D environments, VR performance: Lapis Niger
sound design, original live music: Giulia Rae
set design: Federica Amatuccio
costumes: Teleki
programming and digital curator: Tancredi Di Giovanni
live streaming curators: Lele Marcojanni
audio curator: Riccardo Gamondi
a creation by Collettivo ØNAR
produced by MALTE
with the support of Ministero della Cultura, Regione Marche

residencies: DAS – Dispositivo Arti Sperimentali
winner of RESIDENZE DIGITALI 2021 a project by Centro di Residenza della Toscana (Armunia CapoTrave/Kilowatt), in collaboration with AMAT, Anghiari Dance Hub, ATCL for
Spazio Rossellini, Centro di Residenza Emilia-Romagna (L’arboreto-Teatro Dimora / La Corte Ospitale), Teatro della Tosse, Zona K
supported with a fellowship by FONDO Network for emerging creativity 2022 developed by Santarcangelo Festival with AMAT, Centrale Fies, ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Fondazione Fabbrica Europa, I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora | Centro di Residenza Emilia-Romagna, Operaestate Festival Veneto / CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, Ravenna Teatro, Teatro Pubblico Campano, Teatro Pubblico Pugliese, TSU Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria, Triennale Milano Teatro
winner of the international open call LMDP 2023

Mappe del Nuovo Mondo (Maps of the New World) is a platform focusing on the new performing arts scene which shows creative processes and outcomes of young artists and international protagonists who work with body languages, music, sound, new technologies and interaction with the public, experimenting new practices and site-specific formats.