Made in ILVA - The Contemporary Hermit

There comes a point in the middle of Made in ILVA where you feel as if you might be going mad yourself. Hallucinating the fact that performer Nicola Pianzola keeps repeating over and over "the brutalisation" while hammering the steel set with his palms (which are surely by now raw). Delirious with the metal rhythms he beats, and the sight of him twitching and fitting under a blood-red and white strobe light.

It’s likely this is the desired effect, because the solo show aims to pay homage to the community around Italy’s ILVA plant who were affected by workplace fumes, brutal treatment and inhumane conditions. Incorporatng victim testimonies, Pianzola goes about recreating with forensic precision the destruction of both mind and body; by the end of the show he is rinsed in sweat, ecstatic with exhaustion, glowing and talking about angels and the shine of his skin.

It’s a double-edged sword presenting verbatim suffering like this, and it does occasionally backfire. His repetition of the soul-crushing mundanity of going to work every day outstays its welcome—granted far less than for the people he is depicting—and we don’t ever really get a sense of the humans behind the shells before their everyman descent into hell. Consequently there isn’t enough for us to empathise with. Pianzola honours the horror of people dehumanised by factory life with every fibre of his body, but the piece doesn’t necessarily do justice to their individual stories.