Marcus Aurelius, Conversation with Himself
- 2025
- CGI video, sound, 8:22
- Text & video: Stefano Stoppa
In a suspended landscape of skies and clouds, the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius delivers, over the course of a single day from dawn to dusk, a soliloquy in which two existential postures confront one another: an innocent hedonism on the one hand, hungry for bucolic pleasures as well as for love and human warmth; and a caricatural Stoicism on the other, excessively rigid and nihilistic. If the philosophical substance of the reasoning is presumably common to every age, the same cannot be said of its concrete content, which, speaking to us of flirting or lasagne, belongs decidedly to our own present, almost as though it meant to induce us, were it not for the grandiloquent pose on horseback of the one pronouncing it, to address him simply as Marcus: no longer an emperor, but a young bourgeois torn between an evening out for sushi and more austere matters. Reinforcing the pathos of this conceit, the staging brings in the animation of the statue’s face and the abrupt, expressionist shifts of the celestial landscape in keeping with his mood. With this almost immodest access to the emperor’s intimacy, we run the risk of feeling pity for a deeply irresolute and troubled Marcus Aurelius.
Text by Federica Arcoraci e Pietro Sabelli for the expo e il mio caro cuore rise
