Cecilia Iaconelli

I don’t think we could go back to where we were.
Puppet, Object, Shadow Theatre Performance,
Approx. 25 minutes

I Don’t Think We Could Go Back to Where We Were takes its title from a sentence repeatedly overheard during the World Economic Forum in Davos, transforming it into the threshold of an irreversible metamorphosis.

Grounded in fieldwork that analyzes the conference as a performative apparatus, the work investigates "truth" and authority not as objective facts, but highly choreographed constructs staged through protocols, postures, and codified languages. The panel is approached as a contemporary ritual: a Western mechanism designed to validate collective beliefs.
Within this framework, puppet and object theatre introduce a surrealist friction.

The absolute protagonists are the speakers' hands, chosen because they are an essential, calculated tool of political communication and public speech. Inspired by William Kentridge’s reflections on gesture and Plato’s cave of shadows, the performance treats these movements as primary instruments of persuasion that communicate far more than spoken words.

By isolating and re-scaling the body down to the hands, the work destabilizes the image of authority. The raised finger and the circling palm oscillate between absolute certainty and mocked vulnerability, exposing the hidden choreography behind how power is exercised.

However, this carefully orchestrated control is an illusion. The choreography begins to fracture under the weight of technical glitches and errors, which act not as simple failures, but as a revealing force that shows the underlying machinery of power.

As mundane conference objects cease to be neutral and begin to rebel, the dramaturgy shifts toward magical realism.

Speech yields to an abstract vocal drone, light dissolves into shadow, and the rational protocol mutates into a collective catharsis, inviting the audience to cross the fourth wall to inhabit the shared uncertainty of the present.

Timetable:

2nd July - 7th July : everyday at 18.30
Extra Slots:
Thursday, 2 July - 20.00
Saturday, 4 July - 16.00
Room BA.016

About

Cecilia Iaconelli is an artist and applied anthropologist whose work examines the cultural norms, roles and symbols that shape our everyday environments. She identifies the symbolic structures embedded in shared contexts—such as conferences and mundane routines—and tilts them just enough to expose their humour, tension and poetic potential. Her practice moves across performance, object theatre, stop-motion animation and sound design, exploring symbolic communication, shared imagination and the ways cultural norms, roles and symbols can be re-performed or reimagined.

Credits

Coach
Sjaron Minailo

Music
Cecilia Iaconelli and Pietro Caramelli

Sound design
Pietro Caramelli

Director of Photography
Matteo Montaldo

Graphic Advisor
Silvia Bovo

Costumes Design
Marina Maschek

Actors

Presenter
Cecilia Iaconelli

Professor
Good
Pietro Caramelli

Conference
System
Sophie Schiettekatte

Choir

Cecilia Iaconelli,
Pietro Caramelli,
Renee Jonker,
Sophie Schiettekatte,

Special Thanks to

Andrea Vogrig
Alessandro Tollari
Alberto Cappellina
Leonardo Iaconelli
Lola Posani
Mirko Pirisi Lutzu
Patrizia Arensi
Sabin Garea and Nico Vischi