Julia Wagner

Vorrei un caffè?

Interactive Installation/Performance
July 2018 | @Civitella (IT)/Darmstadt (GER)



How can you transport a stranger to a place he's never been to? How can you project individual memories onto one scenery?

This interactive intimate play in zero acts is the result of a week long field trip to Civitella, Italy with Prof. Ursula Gillmann. Topic of the trip was to find other ways of portraying a place than by the more conventional techniques of photography and filmography.

I started by analyzing the village of Civitella and it's people. Armed with a pen and a notepad I visited different social meeting places and put on paper anything that caught my eye. The "Bar Roxy" seemed to be where everyone got together. So I decided to sit there day in and day out for one week. I ordered countless Caffè, ate many Cornetti and drank lot's of Aperol Spritz. I gained a deeper understanding of how the bar acted as a social hot spot, who came and which time belonged to wich clientel.

I then categorized the guests and turned them into caracters.(1) I quickly found that having a plot would take away from the experience so the question emerged: how can I tell a story without telling a story? This is when the idea of a play without a plot was born where anyone could project their own idea of Italy onto the setting.(2) I provided the stage and the caracters, everything else is left to the visitor who becomes a part of the story as soon as they enter the stage. I left it up to each visitor to decide wether they wanted to enter the space as themselves (a tourist) or as one of the characters using one of the costumes and character descriptions that were displayed on the back wall (see costumes below).

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