Between Criminal Gaze and Missing Memory: "Genet a Tangeri" by Magazzini Criminali

When a leading Italian theatre group, Magazzini Criminali, staged the play "Genet a Tangeri" in a slaughterhouse in 1985, a scandal burst that had catastrophic consequences on the artists involved. After the immediate reconstruction by Ferdinando Taviani, this episode was cautiously silenced, leaving behind it a missing memory over the gap between the groups' expected response and the spectators' final reactions, between the careful construction of the event and its "criminal" consequent dismaltling. This paper recounts this process while presenting the different layers of interpretation and the various spectatorial stances it implied, which lead to further questions on the boundary between life and art.