The Life of Memory. Letter on a Living Archive
Abstract
I have always been fascinated by the problem of memory, but not only in terms of preserving archival materials. I would like to tell you, Mirella Schino and Francesca Romana Rietti, who, together with Valentina Tibaldi, created the Odin archives, about the new adventure I have embarked on with the Living Archive Floating Islands – Laflis – that we are setting up in Lecce at the Bernardini Library. I would like to share with you my vision, rather than the details of the project, or the institutions involved: the mental trajectory from which this idea was born. The starting point. The motivations behind this new and very long journey of mine.
Keywords
Memory, Archive, Odin Teatret, Laflis
Eugenio Barba
Eugenio Barba is a director and founder of Odin Teatret in 1964 and Ista (International School of Theatre Anthropology) in 1979. He has directed more than eighty performances, some of which were the result of a very long creative process. Among his writings: La canoa di carta. Trattato di Antropologia teatrale (1992); Teatro. Solitudine, mestiere, rivolta; La terra di cenere e diamanti. Il mio apprendistato in Polonia. Seguito da 26 lettere di Jerzy Grotowski a Eugenio Barba (1998); La conquista della differenza (2008); Bruciare la casa. Origini di un regista (2005) and, in collaboration with Nicola Savarese, L’arte segreta dell’attore. Un dizionario di antropologia teatrale (2005) and I cinque continenti del teatro. Fatti e leggende della vita materiale dell’attore (2017). He is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals and has received honorary doctorates from many universities, the Sonning Prize from the University of Copenhagen and the Luigi Pirandello International Prize.