Many years ago, something huge and unique happened. Something enormous apparently born from the gathering of small things: an abandoned machine, a handful of blue dust that glowed at night. By small things many bodies were hit. Lots of houses, lots of people. Many generations. Many years went by. But it is not enough to bring back this something in the form of truth. In fact, those who had the public word power in them, worked as in a theatrical script to distribute roles and responsibilities in the most convenient way. For those who remember it, this something is a serious episode, born from the curiosity of people living on the edge of society, guilty because they were innocent and unconscious. Guilty due to the curiosity being from children. And the collective imaginary translated them exactly like that, as children, and that something became fantastic, magical, surreal and atrocious as only fairy tales can be. VOID is a theatrical object made of radioactive scum, voices, omissions, words meaning not what they should mean. Of experiences, of senses. Of sounds. Of reappearances, making the past a dystopian spectrum that can become real at any moment in our present.
The main narrative of our work is the 1980s' tragic episode which mobilized and thrilled the Brazilian and international public opinion and the stories related directly or indirectly to it: The radiological disaster of Goiânia, also known as the accident of Césio 137. Starting from the researches on the episode, the show doesn't go through a documentary path, but
after the exploration of the possibilities, compeling the espectator to transit between skepticism and the official version.
This catastrophe's symbolic power is very significant. The proximity of the social, economic, and geopolitical contradictions that emerge from this tragedy seem like a dark metaphor for contemporary Brazil. The threshold between reality and representation is very uncertain. The limited disappearance of this event from collective memory makes us even doubt its real manifestation. This uncertainty is at the heart of our theatrical research.
About Goiania's radiological disaster
Goiania, the year was 1987, during the transition period between dictatorship and democratic, two young people found an old radiotherapeutic machine in the abandoned Institute of Radiotherapy. They dismantled the equipment and sold it to a city junkyard. Inside the machinery there was a radioactive material nucleus, Cesium-137, a bluish powder that in dark environments has a glowing tone. The material caught the attention of the junkyard's owner that took the radioactive substance to his family and eventually spread throughout the city. Officially 4 deaths were recorded, 151 people were seriously infected and 1143 were affected by the radiation. The Cesium-137 Victims Association stated that by the year 2012, when of the accident's 25th aniversary, about 104 people had died in the following years by contamination, from cancer and other problems, and about 1600 have been directly affected.
"In my previous show called Psychotropic, I set apart a particular memory, which was very significant to me, and multiplied and overlapted it on other fictional narratives somewhat mirroring my memory. It was a way of "pollinate" the spectator's memory using my fragments of memory. VOID is, at the same time, an expansion and an inversion of this experience on the deviations of reality perception. Throughout the show I try to remember something that doesn't belong to my memory, but to the public. Adding uncertainties to my own, it is the audience which "pollinates" the show. It is in the narrative gaps that the public remembers, can remember, can reinvent their memory. "
Alvise Camozzi
