MEDIATHEK

It is possibly due to the fact that J.Rodolfo Wilcock wrote his most well known work in Italian that the Argentinian author is not automatically associated with Argentinian literature. Born in Buenos Aires in 1919, Wilcock died in 1978 in Italy. His short stories and literary incidents are written in the best of Argentinian story-telling traditions. The stories are absurd, seamlessly blurring reality with the surreal, human with animal, people with monsters. Wilcock tells these stories in an everyday language, which underlines the incidental, abstruse figures all the more. In 1972, “The Mavericks’ Stereoscope” was published, in which a world of labyrinths around the Hieronymus Bosch of literature is created: a work full of absurd ideas and virtuosic, deceitful imagination. Seventy mavericks are portrayed in sixty-six stories. One meets a pair of lovers, who decide never to leave their bed and end up consuming themselves. Or there is the emaciated centaur, who paints still life. In another story a “siren” is not at home in the picturesque grottos of the Mediterranean Sea, but on the banks of a stinking river full of rubbish. Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski, Ana Maria Rodriguez and Fred Pommerehn interpret this unusual universe as a labyrinthine course, which will be installed in the circus in Reims. The audience is able to move through the museum-like sound labyrinth and follow the traces left behind by the loners. Winding passageways lead to magnificent showcases and cabinets, which preserve Wilcock’s universe, but are also afflicted by very real phenomena during the course of the evening.