Article by Nicolò Cifarelli

Translation by Linh Carrara

The cold afternoon sun illuminates the pulsating arteries of Rome: in this body, instead of red blood cells, people flow, each with their own past, experiences and aspirations.

It is on these faces that Eleonora Danco’s gaze lingers, who in n-Ego investigates her own artistic crisis. With her face covered by a pantyhose and dressed as a Dechirichian mannequin, the director leads us on a surreal journey. After having addressed, in the previous n-Capace (2014), old age and adolescence, she now chooses to explore adulthood through the encounter with people from different lives, which Danco questions on the universal themes of sex, love, and death. Next to the interviewees, eccentric characters, wrapped in golden cloaks, appear on stage: their alienating presence seems to want to interrogate the viewer on the limits between real and dreamlike, between the visible and the imaginary.

The faces of the working-class suburbs are mixed with those of actors known as Filippo Timi and Elio Germano: in this continuous oscillation between acting and reality, the border between one and the other becomes increasingly blurred, as if fiction were the instrument through which to reflect on the deep sense of existence, in a play of shadows and lights that recalls, once again, the Dechirichian atmospheres.

Eleonora Danco investigates the essence of the human being and the metaphysical dimension that defines us: loves, fears, dreams and passions. And she does this by moving the magnifying glass from the vast Roman landscape towards us, to dig into the recesses of everyone’s experience and to look for answers that escape rational understanding.