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Le ali della farfalla [The Wings of a Butterfly]

This is one in a series of works, from mixed media artworks to installation, inspired by the life of Carl Tanzler, ‘Count von Cosel’ (1877 –1952). Tanzler lived for seven years with the corpse of Elena de Hoyos, a young Cuban girl which had been his patient, and who had died in 1931.

The story is officially classified as a necrophilia case. However, researching Tanzler’s own diaries, the question emerged of whether this could rather be explored as an extreme case of psychotic narcissism, which included episodes of sexual intercourse with a corpse. Thus TWAB is research into a search which is obsessive and restless but which through a process of Jungian enantidromia (in which the excess of one force produces its opposite) seeks to transform the vicious circle of narcissism into a form that communicates.

As part of his research into the relationship between subject and space, a visual score (initially presented at the Vitrine gallery, London) was created which represented the episodes of the relationship/obsession of Tanzler with Elena. This elaborated a method which enabled the story to be edited, not via the narrative, but via the different interactions of the spaces involved in the story. To this a specific musical score was added: employing the consonance between von Cosel and the Don Giovanni of Mozart (a similar case, with the difference that the narcissistic love, and consequent feeling of omnipotence, is projected toward ‘objects’ plural). The result was a performance (co-created with Marino Formenti) which made use of the combined scores. In performance, the excess of narcissism becomes a metaphor for an identification process, which can be seen as an epistemological journey into the self. TWAB was presented at the Museum MADRE in Naples and as a subsequent installation Von Cosel Suite at the KunstlerHaus, Vienna.