Carmelo Bene

Carmelo Bene. Là dove muore, canta is the work of the artist Rä di Martino as she comes to terms with the memory of Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), through his archive materials. A documentary heritage made up of videos, audios, photographs, manuscripts and some six thousand volumes from his own personal library, from which di Martino sets out to develop a cycle bringing Bene’s figure and work back to life. Rä di Martino enters the phantasmagorical library of the actor and playwright, and examines books with which, as an obsessive reader, he had an osmotic relationship, annotating their pages. With a series of frontal photographic images, the artist focuses on the most studied pages, full of his scribbles and Post-its. She also goes through the actor’s diaries, where he penned a work on Dracula that remained unfinished, and which the artist decided to photograph in its entirety. The volume also features an introductory text by Brizia Minerva and a critical contribution by Chiara Valerio.