Lorenzo Bazzocchi on Masque Teatro's Meccanica Anima: Between Alchemy and Perspective

Lorenzo Bazzocchi discusses Meccanica Anima, a project by Masque Teatro that blends installation, performance, and experiment. The work superimposes two art historical images—Piero della Francesca's Resurrection and Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass—into a ferrous, majestic materiality. A red horizontal line, borrowed from Duchamp and Piero, scans images to orient vision, rejecting a single Albertian viewpoint. The piece features two bodies: one animated, one balanced between automaton, flesh, and voice. Bazzocchi emphasizes process over product, viewing theater as processuality, poiesis, and praxis. The performance includes a mechanical coturnus percussed by the left foot, suggesting an Edipic fragility. The artist rejects traditional theater conventions, preferring visual devices and color relations. The work aims to give a landscape to the figure, not a niche. Bazzocchi sees the spectator not as a single referent but as multiple viewpoints. The project originated from studies in projective mathematics and alchemy, though Bazzocchi avoids didacticism. The screw bottle opener at the top negates the trinity, a blasphemy against Piero's triangular composition. The piece was presented at the Triennale di Milano in the late 1990s as Coefficiente di fragilità. Bazzocchi is an artist and co-founder of Masque Teatro, based in Forlì, Italy.