“What you have to prove in criminal trials like this is that what happened was absolutely real.”
Interview with P.F., magistrate, 29 Oct 2019
«Unfortunately my father himself was a pervert and caused the hysteria of my brother (all the symptoms of which are identifications) and of one of my younger sisters».
Sigmund Freud, Letter to W. Fleiss, 8 Feb 1897
“I told her, ‘You have to tell me what he did to you, tell me!’ but inside I prayed, ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me…’”
Interview with V.M., the mother
INSIDE is the staging of my encounter with a woman and her secret story. The story of a truth locked inside bodies and struggling to come out into the open. An experience that is difficult to listen to. A mother who discovers the worst of truths. A daughter who hates her mother. A father who is innocent until proven guilty. And an audience of therapists, consultants, educators, doctors, social workers, lawyers who do not want to know the truth. The secret has a precise content and a positive purpose: it protects something or someone. The secret silences a truth that could harm innocent people. Censorship also has a precise content but its purpose is the opposite of that of the secret: it harms the innocent, protects vile interests. The taboo, on the other hand, for us today, is the pure terror of knowing, so its content remains ambiguous and indeterminate.
In all the cases of child abuse that I have learned from the voice of the victims, no guilty party has ever been convicted. Sexual violence is a secret that remains a lifetime inside homes, inside the offices of doctors, psychotherapists or lawyers, in those private dimensions in which the victims can remain confined without being recognized. The compassionate purposes of the secret almost always merge with the shameful ones of censorship and with the unconscious ones of taboo. The very existence of the victims, with their unapproachable anger or with their inconsolable pain, disturbs us to the roots and so, in order not to handle the hatred of the fathers, we deplore that of the children.
History as old as patriarchy: narratives that are strategies of removal and concealment, first and foremost the normalization of abuse itself and the blaming of the victim. Even the founding stories of Western civilization are all stories of trauma, and yet, while we know everything about Oedipus, we know very little about Laius, the murderous father. In order to save the order of the fathers, we have always built conceptual scaffolding that makes the reality of trauma and the voice of experience lose consistency. And if our experience of violence cannot be recognized, then our ontological dimension is undermined at the root, perhaps we ourselves cease to exist.
DENTRO is not a theatre of investigation, it is the investigation itself, when it is still in life, my own life.
DENTRO is not a work about violence but about the concealment of violence.
DENTRO is a small theatrical tribute to the truth of children.
