Performative place as memory space. Fabio Mauri, "Che cos'è il fascismo" and "Ebrea", 1971

Abstract

In 1971, in a few months, Fabio Mauri staged two "actions", explicitly dealing with fascism and with the extermination of the Jews: Che cosa è il fascismo and Ebrea. The first is a complex action, a real show with many actors and a disciplined audience within a series of tribunes set up in a film studio. The other takes place in the smaller scale of a private gallery, and features just one actress who plays her performance. Mauri was born in 1926; both his biography and his family story have been marked by fascism (the publishing house of Mauri’s uncle, Valentino Bompiani, had published in 1934 the Italian translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf). From the first solo exhibition, presented by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1955, Mauri’s work as an artist was part of Roman avant-garde. At a difficult time of Italian history, shortly after the attempted Borghese coup d’état and in the period in which some artists survived to the concentration camps make for the first time public their experience, the use of both theatrical space and new expressive tools appear imperative to face the memory of fascism and Shoah.