Starting from an investigation into Debord’s philosophy, Teatringestazione questions the statutes of the image at the time of “videocracy”. Monàs is a hybrid work between participatory installation, choreographic composition and live cinema, giving life to a “provisional micro-society”, a coexistence space. The scenic apparatus in which the audience participates is conceived as an ecosystem, within which it is possible to experience the deferment of one’s own body in an image, to reflect on the relationship between real space and space of representation, and how in this fracture an exercise of power is suffered or practised.

Monàs attempts to focus on the statute of the image and its political and social significance, investigating the gap between reality and post-truth and how, in this fracture, an exercise of power is suffered or practised.

The “nomadic” spectators enter a stage space broken down into elementary functions. They can spontaneously choose to occupy the different fractions of the space, inhabiting it in action, observation, reading, listening, and moving freely between one function and another, staying in a single fraction or rejoining the previous ones if necessary.

The performer’s body writes and inscribes itself among the mass of passers-by “in a given unit of time”. A “provisional micro-society” (Debord 1959) is created. The porous dance receives the gestures of the spectator-participants in a reciprocal interference, redefining the figures on the screen, which together form an “anthropic” panorama: a landscape made up of figures “á la dérive” (t/n: adrift), fictitious identities or copies of real identities, unrecognisable faces, bodies fragmented by the focal aperture of the camera, unfinished presences that in front of the screen remain evocation and representation. The individual contributes to the background, the mass becomes an echo, a premonition. “Being’ is a chase after superimposition, the cancellation of the figures on the screen. To subtract oneself means eliminating one’s figure from the landscape, with all this entails. A fragmentation of the self into an infinite range of coexisting identities occurs. And when the game is consumed in repetition, the true substance of things appears.

The research makes use of the spatial and interactive space dispositif “Not Found” (ᵇ), which originated from an investigation into “the Society of the Spectacle” (Debord, 1967). A space of action, observation and contemplation, which simultaneously welcomes performers and visitors. A dimension of publicity and sharing is constituted in a space arranged around a screen. An element of separation/transmission/diffusion, whose presence separates and relates a series of places, defines asymmetrical modes of relation, multiplies the thresholds between action and contemplation. This scenic apparatus offers us an opportunity to examine the conditions of our own presence and its political meaning in a space of coexistence; a true ecosystem, within which it is possible to reflect on the relationship between real space and space of representation.

The dispositif creates a heterotopia, where the image finds its concreteness in the mediation of the machine that forces the participant to find the position and movement that makes the image meaningful. The mechanism is implemented through the subtraction of movement, as we understand it composed of instants that mark consequential moments of action. The apparatus makes the movement fluid by creating a trail that erases the instants, making visible only the moments in which the body is truly still. To exist, to find a definition, we must deform the way we move or exasperate movement. In this way, the image materialises on the screen; but this deformation makes the screen a heterotopia, taking away its sense and meaning from real movement. We are therefore faced with the choice of existing in one world or the other since both are only possible in inaction, in “posing”.