Falcone and Borsellino, or the Martyrs’ Wall (2017)

Production photographs

“[…] I simply wished to place myself in a state of listening, entering into a kind of ideal dialogue with the librettist and the composer. […] One perceives a profound love for truth and justice, embodied in the ceaseless exhortation to remember the martyrdom of Falcone, Borsellino, and all the other victims of the Mafia—names that must be honored and renewed in memory.
My hope is that the duration of this work of music theatre may assume the same meaning as that minute of silence we are accustomed to offering the departed. Not a mere exercise in rhetoric, but rather a pause—whether of meditation or of prayer—away from the immediacy of the present, from the unrelenting stream of information and events that overwhelm us and drive us toward oblivion and forgetfulness. […]
A great wall becomes the place where humankind stands before the darkness of the mysterium iniquitatis, that shadowy force which impels man to annihilate his own brother and, in so doing, himself.”

from the Director’s Notes by Maria Paola Viano