Ubu Award 2022 winner as the best show of the year, L'Angelo della Storia [The Angel of History] is the latest work by Sotterraneo, a Florentine theatrical research collective, which unfolds before the eyes of the audience a constellation of paradoxical historical anecdotes: facts and thoughts that are distant from each other but are united by a web of narratives, beliefs, myths and ideologies which, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, form the true essence of History.

In his latest work, the philosopher Walter Benjamin describes an angel who flies with his gaze focused on the past and his back to the future: the rubble of buildings and ideologies piles up before his eyes – musical instruments at the bottom of the ocean, malfunctioning radars, beached whales – and the angel wishes to stop and reassemble the debris – dead babies, statues in Antarctica, fluorescent rabbits –, but a storm inflates his wings and it inexorably drags him forward – hysterical mass dances, jammed parachutes, millionaire cats: this storm is what we call progress. Although the angel observes the succession of events – hands on the keys of a piano, atomic mushrooms, postcards in the jungle – and tries to resist the storm, he cannot stop and intervene, he cannot put the pieces back together and re-found a shared reality. He can do absolutely nothing to help us – also because angels don't really exist. What other sentient being would try to reassemble something that was broken, dismantle narratives and – regardless of whether he is flying or not – finally turn around to look forward?

“Today, when complexity requires innovative imaginary worlds and new cognitive processes”, we read in the director’s notes, “we like to think that in the theatre we can recover narratives and circumstances that have dominated Homo sapiens over the millennia, disassemble them, recombine them, distance ourselves from them by moving away in time and seek at least a little of that sense of vertigo that an astronaut feels when he observes the Earth moving away from him in space.”