Marco Fusinato: IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT

Eight hours a day, for twenty-one days, across two floors of the Gorki Theater, artist and noise musician Marco Fusinato transforms Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg into a durational performance-installation combining experimental sound, moving images, and live performance.

Conceived specifically for the Gorki, IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT marks Fusinato’s first work developed for the theatre. For more than two decades, his practice has moved between contemporary art and experimental music. He gained international recognition with DESASTRES, his 200-day performance-installation for the Australian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

At the Gorki, Fusinato turns the Gallery in the former foyer into a stage, while performing live in the main theatre hall on the first floor. Both spaces operate simultaneously. Visitors move freely between them, without a prescribed beginning, sequence, or single point of view.

At the center of Kleist’s drama lies a conflict between obedience and individual freedom. The Prince wins the Battle of Fehrbellin by defying military orders, yet his victory leads to a death sentence. His fate raises a question that extends far beyond the historical setting of the play: what happens when an individual's actions collide with the authority of the state, even when those actions succeed? Fusinato brings this conflict into contact with a contemporary world in which power and violence are inseparable from their representation, and images of conflict, catastrophe, and repression circulate almost instantaneously. Rather than illustrating Kleist’s drama, the work confronts its tensions with the political and sensory conditions of the present.

Three materials form the basis of Fusinato’s adaptation. The first is a yellow Reclam edition of Kleist’s play, in which every line not spoken by the Prince has been crossed out. The second is Deutsche Grammophon’s three-LP recording of Peter Stein’s landmark 1972 Schaubühne production. The third is a largely forgotten Kleist monument in the courtyard of a Berlin school, whose face has been scanned and reproduced as masks worn by the performers.

On the ground floor, performers continuously activate these materials. Manually spinning records at glacial speed, they transform theatrical speech into guttural tones, sustained textures, and fractured harsh noise. Wearing Kleist’s face and working with the Prince’s isolated words, they move between embodiment and disappearance. 

Upstairs, Fusinato performs an extended electric-guitar improvisation alongside a relentless sequence of moving images drawn from diverse sources. Amplified sound and visual material collide, producing an overwhelming encounter with spectacle, transmission, interruption, and collapse.

The two floors become coexisting states of consciousness: downstairs, language, discipline, and representation; upstairs, improvisation, collision, and excess. Neither resolves the other.

IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT is the second major project of Çağla İlk’s inaugural season as Artistic Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater. Following Sarkis’s FUGE, which transformed the building into a living installation, and the reactivation of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical legacy, Fusinato extends a program in which theatre, performance, and experimental music enter into direct exchange.

Members of the new Gorki ensemble make their first appearance for the season alongside performers from Constanza Macras’s DorkyPark. Across twenty-one days, theatre becomes a space to inhabit, move through, listen to, and experience through duration and physical proximity. 

Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and noise musician whose practice sits at the intersection of contemporary art, experimental music, and institutional critique. For more than two decades, he has exhibited and performed internationally. His work has been presented at the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012), Soundings: A Contemporary Score at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018). In 2022, he represented Australia at the 59th Venice Biennale  with DESASTRES. His work was featured at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Auditions for an Unwritten Opera (2023) and Sea and Fog (2024). In 2026, he participated in the inaugural exhibition of Dib Bangkok and presented the survey exhibition THE ONLY TRUE ANARCHY IS THAT OF POWER at PAC, Milan.