The story

This is the story of a man who photographs himself in order to feel less lonely.
He opens a studio and immortalises himself, playing the roles of customer and professional photographer.
By multiplying his image, he ends up believing he’s a politician speaking to a crowd. A crowd that doesn’t exist. But which he galvanizes as we do all the things we’ll never have.
Between one rally and the next, he declares himself to be the builder of travelling hospitals that go directly into the homes of the sick.
And there he is, in these hospitals: in the guise of the head physician, in that of the patient, or as the cowled nuns who substitute medicine with the instruments of faith.

With this inflation of his image, he very soon convinces himself that he is no longer alone.
And he continues his political forays, delegating himself to culture in order to build impossible cinemas where erotism differs from pornography thanks only to a few fleeting traces of dialogue.
And he hypothesises fires and disasters, with emergency exits to bring to safety the average spectator that he himself represents.
From time to time he returns to the photographer that he is, forcing himself to take new photos.
And little by little he loses his mind.
But never entirely.
In the surge of his ravings in his own presence, he even turns himself into a woman, masking all his nudity; and into a man, believing himself to be now one, now the other, imagining going out together with himself and returning beside himself.
And as a politician he approves every town-planning scheme so that he can give himself a travelling home, like his hospitals. Like the desperation of one trying to dupe himself.
And only when he is forced to have a dog defend his home does he realise he is alone – and that he is that very dog who is guarding his property.

But in an unexpected reversal, he goes back from being a dog to a politician, and accuses the electorate of not having understood. Of not having understood that nothing has ever existed.
The only thing that existed was his loneliness.
Which cannot be photographed, because loneliness is the absence of those who are not with you.

Setting

The stage setting consists of five elements, the TOTEMS; the arms are extended, trying to contain the surroundings; hanging from the totems are sculptures and mobile volumes that make it possible to cross the whole stage – the mutating scenic frames* are present.
White, in various tonalities, is the dominating colour, with slashes of bright reds, greens and blues.
The white sphere, rolling in a space of which it completely ignores the rules, wanders like a mental microcosm, habitative and definitive.

The spheroid with Antonio rotates midst the audience in the central aisle of the theatre on an extension from the illuminated stage. The means that leads to nothing fitted with wheels to make moving around agile.
Other human presences are foreseen on stage with Antonio A passenger – A crowd.

* The mutants are the stage frames that, sliding down the metal supports, become a dress or an appendix of the body. They first appeared in the set of barba e cravatta (beard and tie) and later evolved in volume with Io.