Text by Daniele Cassandro

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In Zoo, one of his best-known plays, French-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco describes his falling in love with a gorilla named Tandzo, locked in a zoo cage. In an exchange with the primatologist assisting him, Blanco, who impersonates himself on stage, reveals much about his theory of self-fiction. He has brought an illustrated copy of Marco Polo's The Million to Tandzo's cage and tries to explain to the animal what it is about: "It is an extraordinary book. It is said to have inspired the voyage of Christopher Columbus. What is most fascinating is the way it mixes reality with legend."

"Kind of like you do," the doctor replies promptly.

Sergio Blanco's self-fiction, the literary and theatrical practice underlying his work, is largely mixing reality (the personal and autobiographical datum) with legend, where legend is all that particulate of cultural suggestions that thicken around us in the course of our lives. We are desiring animals made of flesh and nerves but also of the sum of all the images, stories, poems, paintings, novels, films, and music that have formed us over time. Through his love for Tandzo, which is also a physical as well as a spiritual, philosophical and literary attraction, Blanco is reflected in his dual nature as both beast and legend. Thanks to Tandzo Blanco goes through all the stages of falling in love and love: from lightning strike to jealousy and down in free fall to abandonment and disappointment. And the key that allows the two animals to communicate, because it is clear from the beginning that both Sergio and Tandzo are animals, is beauty: specifically Franz Schubert's Impromptus and Sandro Botticelli's painting.

In Divina invención o la celebración del amor, Sergio Blanco does something different: by staging a lecture/performance he will have to tell himself and the audience about love in all its aspects, bringing as working material, as a canvas, as a clinical case, only himself. Without other people or other animals to make contact with on stage. If there is a seduction, the object of that seduction, of that love talk, will be us, the audience in the room. And every act of seduction is born from a tale, a tale to that we want to believe to at all costs and that we hope will never end. Ever since the days of Sherazade.

For Blanco, the self-fiction lecture is a way of bringing together in one medium, his body and his voice on stage, two different modes of storytelling: the objectivity of science and the extreme subjectivity of loving discourse. "The result will always be a hybrid word that has the caution of the academic and the exaltation of the artist," the author explains.

For Sergio Blanco, selffiction is something very different from the self-fiction from to which we have been besieged in recent years, especially here in Italy. Blanco's is neither a navel-gazing, hyper-identifying or absolutist self-narrative, nor is it an attempt to describe the world solely and only through his own experience. It is an act of profound humility and intellectual sincerity: Blanco stages himself because his is the only subjectivity he knows. It is the only certain starting point to be able to explore the other.

On stage there is only Sergio Blanco, a desk and a wall on which images are projected. Here again, as in Tandzo's cage, are figures to do from catalyst to the love discourse: but there is no longer only Botticelli's Tuscan composure, his ideal form so well contained from a graceful design filled with wonderful colors. On Blanco's screen appear the twisted forms and color-frage, given to strokes of the palette knife, of Francis Bacon's painting. An art that the painter himself called "figure art," in opposition to abstractionism certainly, but also in continuity with the great Baroque art, especially that of Spain in the 17th century, from which he was obsessed with. An art that amazed and appalled but at the same time drew the modern world, told and taught.

Blanco himself explains what the goal of his lecture-show is: "While it is true, as Lope says, that love is a science that makes us wise, it is also true that it connects us with our most bestial part. The times in my life when I have come closest to the animal are when I was in love. In any case, beyond the fact that love exists in civilization and barbarism, in wisdom and ignorance, in the human and the brutal, I think it is a sublime experience that always ends in transformation.

And it is the same sublime that Francis Bacon's images suggest, here treated from Philippe Koscheleff, which in their contortions, in their pulsing, in their opening so impudently to our eyes, show the human eternally struggling with the animal. But always, even when we see his exposed spine, or his jaw dislocated in a scream, or his limbs tangled in themselves, or his humors scattered across the canvas, always desperately human. And always searching for love.