On the occasion of its 28th edition, the VolterraTeatro Festival, organised by Carte Blanche and directed by Armando Punzo, intends to turn the Prison and the City into a unique and wide natural stage, to make places, art and people merge into a single great work of art.

The festival has confirmed its historic propensity to combine the several languages of art and it will again interweave theatre, music, dance, poetry and visual arts to create a solid and consistent project which will occupy the places of Volterra and of all the other municipalities involved in the festival, Pomarance, Castelnuovo Val di Cecina, Montecatini Val di Cecina, from 21st to 27th July.

Based on the dramatic collapse of the Volterran medieval walls, the Festival intends to reflect on the idea of the “Wound” (in Italian: “Ferita“).

Beyond the visible wound of the earth, it proposes an approach to the invisibile, human, private wound of the artist, together with a city which wants to heal that wound and courageously tries to strengthen the human relationship among its inhabitants. In a wounded city, this festival reveals an even deeper wound, under the surface, under what can be seen, to open our eyes on an earth which silently collapses under our feet.

A painful yet luminous wound, which should be regarded as an occasion to expose the breaking point, to get an intense beauty ooze from the pian, to turn weakness into an intense strength.

Thus, the Prison and the City will be the places where the impossible will be played, becoming reality by means of art: the pain will turn into immense beauty.

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I keep on believing that the community of artists should unite and open up to the sensitive people and all together should work to create dreams behind the times. I cannot see any other possibilty to get out of this condition of alienation and conformity. With whom can we share our imposed solitude, if not with those who are consciously trying to free themselves from such condition? How else can we escape from the rock where, like Prometheus, we are enchained? For such a brief time can we feel euphoric about the loneliness created by our own wound, by our critic view of the world, by the feeling of betrayal brought by the mankind… It is like a sweet illusion to cuddle in solitude, it may appear exciting and heroic, rare and precious, but eventually it is for sure just a human, cultural and falsely comforting trap which slowly becomes permanent inside us. This unproductive condition has spread into our country and our city below the surface, we have to regard it as a disease to eradicate. We have to watch beyond the walls that stand inside us, we must climb them, we must reach the top and see the new world. I do not want to hide behind the horrors of the life – as I have imagined until now – I do not want to denounce wars, violences and abuses of men of power and corrupted politicians, I do not want to bring into me the rottenness of existence – as if it had to be reduced to such vilenesses – I do not want to feel sympathy, to feel superior in such a hypocrite and deceptive way; I do not want to compliment those who reproduce and repeat the existence, but I want to compliment those who are working hard to produce new human realities, new relationships between the man and the world, between the man and the man. “To find” comes from “to search”, it is the cathegorical imperative that every artist should follow, like a faith that does not make us asleep and does not annihilate us in the plot of a hopeless existence, but a faith that goes along with our inner animal essence – that has got nothing either pure or innocent.
Armando Punzo