ROBERT WILSON

“…A text by Tchinigis Aitmatov describes a Mongolian torture which served to turn captives into slaves, tools without memory. The technology was simple: the captive, who had been sentenced to survival and not designated for the slave trade but for domestic use by the conquerors, had his head shaved and covered with a helmet made from the skin of a freshly slaughtered camel’s neck. Buried to the shoulders, and exposed on the steppe to the sun, which dried the helmet and contracted it around the skull, the regrowing hair was forced to grow back into the scalp. The tortured prisoner lost his memory within five days, if he survived and was, after his operation, a laborer who didn’t cause trouble, a ‘Mankur’….There is no revolution without memory.”
Heiner Müller
(excerpt from a letter written to Robert Wilson)

This letter, written to Robert Wilson in 1987, inspired the installation Memory/Loss, created for the Biennale di Venezia XLV Esposizione
Internazionale d’Arte for “Transactions” – the section dedicated to the artists whose work has been represented in theatre, cinema, and visual arts. he thought of Memory/Loss as an architectural poem of sculpture, sound and light. Wilson has used Tadeusz Kantor’s sculpture in this space – a figure of the head and shoulders of a man, buried in a plain of cracked, dried mud – another artist who has always worked in different fields and who had a predilection for the theme of memory. The sound score has been composed by Hans Peter Kuhn who has used Wilson’s voice as well in the blend.

This installation, realized for the first time in a beautiful antique granary in Venice, was awarded the Golden Lion for sculpture by the XLV Biennale di Venezia.

PRODUCTION DATES
Venice, Italy, Biennale di Venezia
13 June – 10 October 1993
Krakow, Poland, 8 December 2000