nuvolario #Helena

content

“In psychology, pareidolia are images of clouds in the sky to which the human mind ascribes meaning. It’s a precursor to hallucination. But you would know, wouldn’t you?” Adrian Sauer

 

According to an alternative version of the myth, Helen never went to Troy. It was a cloud that went there, a piece of sky, an eidolon, a ghost of air in the guise of Helen; a celestial deception. Pareidolia is a stratagem, a faint hallucination or a cloudy pretext for starting a war that has defined Western culture. It is no coincidence that Euripides wondered: “And for a cloud we have suffered so much, just for that?”

In nuvolario #Helena, Maria Isidora Vincentelli’s body becomes, literally, a meteor. A rotating movement that vanishes into the sky, eluding the violence that reduces complex and ever-changing phenomena to controllable syntax.

 

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How can the ephemeral be captured in a syntax? Grammatical logics are imposed on elusive landscapes, and if a cloud or a river misbehaves, we invent the language of risk: flash flood, flood, hurricane, violence, subsidence, war.

Hydrology, mythology, and sociology reveal the logics of domination that discipline landscapes and bodies through maps, borders, and systems of classification. Against the static nature of the line, nuvolario #Helena sets the mutability of air as a metaphor for a matter and an existence that elude control.

Cultural taxonomies all resemble one another, and we must remember, always remember, that “the map is not the territory”.

 

nuvolario is a project that looks upwards, an observation of the transformative power of clouds in the most illusory mechanisms; seeing what is not there. Relegated to the domain of vagueness by their tendency to conceal celestial references, clouds have long been perceived as the enemy of clear thinking, the nemesis of philosophers and scientists. Yet they have always deciphered reality by revealing the deceptive transparency of the air and signalling other atmospheric phenomena; an aspect that, combined with their shape-shifting nature, has made them the obsession of painters, photographers, meteorologists and the military.

Filippo Andreatta explores the elusive vertigo of celestial landscapes and their precipitate into our present. Visible only from afar, clouds are the rare moment when the atmosphere materialises, a taxonomy of sky forms getting through the stage and its celestial artifices.

Evanescent as a cloud, the project constantly changes shape while remaining unchanged in its name: nuvolario.

 

year

2026

time

0:40:00.0

genre

theatre

credits

NUVOLARIO #HELENA
by Filippo Andreatta

> directing, set and writing Filippo Andreatta
> with Maria Isidora Vincentelli
> text Prathima Muniyappa
> music and sound Davide Tomat
> associate set designer Cosimo Ferrigolo
> dramaturgical research Veronica Franchi

> administration Lucrezia Stenico
> production Rebecca Sivieri
> international promotion Valentina Bertolino
> photographer Giacomo Bianco
> technician Marco Filippone
> animal spirit yún (云)

> production Office for a Human Theatre
> co-production La Contrada Teatro stabile di Trieste
> artistic residency Saari Residence - Kone Foundation (FI), Teatro alla Cartiera Rovereto, Grand Theatre Groningen (NL), Centro di Residenza delle Arti Performative del Friuli Venezia Giulia / La Contrada Teatro stabile di Trieste
> supported by MiC, Fondazione Caritro, Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Comune di Rovereto

production history

27.X-02.XI.2025 > teatro alla Cartiera, Rovereto > residency
18-20.II.2026 > La Contrada Teatro stabile di Trieste > residency + open studio
1-6.III.2026 > Grand Theatre Groningen > residency + open studio
28.V.2026 > Primavera dei Teatri, Castrovillari > preview
26.IX.2026 > festival delle 100 Scale, Potenza > preview
18.X.2026 > Periferico festival, Modena > premiere

replicas

05