Talos

Making theatre and art a viaticum for understanding the world, is what pushes Arkadi Zaides to go on stage, to denounce and to become a human rights activist. Back in Rovereto, five years after his 'political' and documentary solo Archive - a burning investigation into the management of cohabitation in the occupied territories in the West Bank, seen through the eyes of the Palestinians - the Belarusian artist, originally active in Israel and now in France, presents Talos at the Festival.

A solo which takes its name from the research project funded by 10 countries and 14 world institutions between 2008 and 2013, aimed at the development of a state-of-the-art IT system for monitoring territorial borders. Monitoring and control measures against illegal immigration with semi-autonomous robots in support of the border guards. Although the European TALOS project remained an experiment - a fully-fledged test on technological capability - the discovery of such research led Zaides to develop his Talos together with a team composed of choreographers, playwrights and video artists to answer some questions: what is the possible relationship between movement, groundbreaking technologies and the fate of borders? What kind of choreography arises and develops near a territorial limit? What restrictive strategies define movement?

On stage Zaides establishes a dynamic game of action and reaction, limitation and transgression, stasis and stillness helped by technology. Zaides once again wants to encourage the audience's critical spirit: he doesn’t present his point of view but rather the mechanisms that pushed the promoting States to develop the research. As a result, his performance doesn’t become a space for debate, but rather an instrument to capture, display and derail an ideology.