Diaries

For the whole week the school bus doesn't take me to school or back home: it takes me to Auschwitz.

The first-year students of the Istituto "Leonardo da Vinci" of Cerreto Guidi, Vinci and Sovigliana undertake a week-long journey into Auschwitz concentration camp, set up for the occasion in the rooms of the Local Memory Museum in Cerreto Guidi. The concentration camp's setting is the background for the project/performance created and directed by Firenza Guidi and realized by Elan Frantoio's Permanent Company. DIARIES marks the beginning of a didactic and artistic journey that will accompany the students for the next three years, until they eventually leave, this time for real, to visit Anna Frank's house in Amsterdam.

The young spectators attend the performance bringing with them a blank diary hand-made by themselves. Through the performance, which gives an insight into life inside the camp, the students become themselves deportees: they look, live, listen, cry and feel emotions on their skin. Their journey fuses together the identity of spectator-witness and that of direct protagonist of the living death of the deportee. At the same time, the students become depositaries of memory in the act of reporting their emotions in their diary, written live throughout the performance.