Agata Tomšič’s interview by Simone Pacini, “Fattiditeatro.it”, October 2, 2025

Agata Tomšič interview by Simone Pacini on Medea Material on the occasion of the preview of the performance at #ogniluogoèunteatro in Vercelli, published on October 2, 2025:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EcRpqXOCnEg

“S.P. We are at the Cuocolo Bosetti house in Vercelli, in the very midst of Every place is a theater. Agata Tomšič is currently in residency here in Vercelli ahead of the preview of ErosAntEros’ new show Medea Material. The preview will be on September 23, followed by a second preview for ErosAntEros’ 15th anniversary in Ravenna on September 26 and 27.

Medea. How relevant is this text today, and how are you working with your musician here in Vercelli these days, Agata?

A.T.: This work was born out of my love for Heiner Müller’s text, which is extremely poetic but also harsh, raw, violent, and rooted in its contemporary context. It was written between the 1950s and 1980s in East Germany, but incredibly it still speaks to us today, especially in the third part, when the personal drama becomes a collective drama. This woman, who was used for political purposes by a colonizer who wanted to take over her land, becomes a pretext for reflecting on our society. In the last monologue, Müller questions us all, asks who we are, makes us all responsible for the world, for the capitalist and colonial system in which we live, and for me this was truly “a call to arms”.

How did you develop it, together with your musician, in terms of space and sound?

A.T.: Matevž Kolenc and I had already worked together on Santa Giovanna dei Macelli, because he is the composer for Laibach, the band we involved in that project. And also in continuity, in other words, from Brecht, we move on to his successor, Müller. I involved Matevž to create a spatial auditory device that surrounds the audience, immersing them in a sound environment where vision and light are dispensed drop by drop—in the sense that they are very low—precisely to leave the auditory, and therefore symbolic, dimension of words and sounds free to express themselves ; and on the other hand, the desire to see, to get excited, because you want to see, but you can’t see, this Medea of ours that I have constructed.

S.P.: A Medea in the dark, in short. Perfect, I’ll end it here, at least we leave a little pathos.”