Romeo Castellucci: Artists Are Not Prophets

In an interview with Artribune, theatre director and set designer Romeo Castellucci (born Cesena, 1960) rejects the notion that artists possess prophetic abilities to interpret historical or current events. He describes his 1992 work 'Hamlet' as the piece that most represents him, conceived as a final assault on theatre's core that instead revealed his own entrapment in classical rhetoric. Castellucci dismisses the importance of genius loci, arguing that theatre fights against absolutism of reality, body, language, time, and place. He believes in the curvature of time, where art draws from all points on its circumference, and the 'ancient' is a liberating concept not tied to nostalgia. He refuses to give advice to young artists, deeming it ineffective and paternalistic. On the sacred in a post-truth era, he claims no sociological expertise but asserts that in theatre, the actor's body retains a sacrificial relation to the sacred, transfigured by the spectator's gaze. The future, he says, is an unreachable horizon; artists are not prophets, but must keep walking.