Much Ado about Kasper / Tanto chiasso per Arlecchino, Ruskin Gallery

It is a work born out of the collaboration between Guillermo Giampietro and the team of Radio Fragola Gorizia, a radio podcast and multimedia production project developed by the partnership between Cooperativa La Collina and the Department for Mental Health of the city of Gorizia.

The work is the remake of Walter Benjamin’s Radau um Kasperl (Much ado about Kasper), broadcasted for the first time by the German National Radio in 1932. The current adaptation of the radio-drama is probably the first one in the Italian translation, enriched with images and adapted for PLACE with English subtitles. Walter Benjamin has been one of the first to theorize the changes in artistic production brought on by technical reproduction in the 20th Century and, at the same time, he’s also famous for his studies about translation.

Through our adaptation we tried to approach different relationships between art and language. Other issues involved have been: translation problems, reinventing the product through space and time in order to make it a timeless radio-drama and to stress the possibility given by infinite reproduction.