At the Avignon Festival, “Mami” or the poetics of reality by Mario Banushi

The stage is covered in earth, with a small stone hut, alone in the middle of nowhere. In the night barely broken by a streetlight, dogs bark. And from the outset, we enter that night, we know that we are going on a journey, and that it will be strange and beautiful. A wave of emotion swept over Avignon on Sunday, July 13, after the premiere of Mami , the show by director Mario Banushi, which confirmed itself as the precious discovery of this Festival.

The young Greek-Albanian artist unfolds a memorial and sensory landscape as intimate as it is universal, in this piece that undoubtedly tells the story of his own life. But in a unique way: through images, light, and bodies, which, in his work, acquire an uncommon force of presence and apparition. No words, in what nevertheless presents itself as an "immaterial book" woven from stories.

It all begins with a young woman giving birth alone, in the night, and with a young man feeding, there is no other word, to an old woman, whose diaper then needs to be changed. The image is reminiscent, in its mixture of crudeness and gentleness, beauty and violence, of On the Concept of the Face of the Son of God , a show by Romeo Castellucci, which caused a sensation in Avignon in 2011. Mami is woven around these figures of mother and grandmother who marked the life of Mario Banushi, but even more deeply around this maternal relationship with multiple relaxation, the grandmother finding herself in turn, at the time of old age, dependent on her grandson.

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