The performance “Let’s Imagine a Heroic Landscape” draws its initial inspiration from the letters from the prison sent by the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg to Sonia Liebknecht between 1917 and 1918. The letters touch us with their pure humanity and the incredible sensitivity they exhibit to everything that lives (bird, insect, plant). The title of the performance comes from a phrase that has been isolated from one of these letters. What is Utopia? What is heroism? How do we fancy a landscape? Rosa seems to find heroism in the humble fight of an overturned beetle with the ants or in a bird’s outburst! How can we deal with the small, seemingly insignificant in heroic terms?  What is worth, for us, fighting for? Let’s create an ephemeral monument, a tribute to Rosa, by using precarious objects and materials just like our bodies and voices!

“Let’s Imagine a Heroic Landscape” is the outcome of one month’s residency of Nova Melancholia at Fivizzano27. During the residency the group gave two masterclasses getting the chance to meet other artists. Fivizzano27 presents Nova Melancholia for the first time in Italy. Three members of the group (Alexia, Kostas and Vassilis) worked on the project “Let’s Imagine a Heroic Landscape” joined by Marcus, coming from Vienna, and Ondina from Rome.This outcome is an ongoing project that will continue in Athens in 2019.

Nova Melancholia, active inside the ever-changing space of theatrical and visual arts performance since 2007, follows non-linear narrations and open dramaturgies. Nova Melancholia uses poetry, essays and other non-theatre literature as material for its work. The aesthetic strategies often include camp and/or gender identities as means of queering the spectator’s experience of the work. This gesture has the ambition to place itself within the current discourse on the political and its relation to today’s artistic product and its work ethics. Nova Melancholia is based in Athens.