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This paper was presented at the 7th international conference on the Image, hosted in Liverpool on 1-2 September 2016. Abstract: Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an explicit interest to deal with theater as a visual... more
This paper was presented at the 7th international conference on the Image, hosted in Liverpool on 1-2 September 2016.

Abstract:
Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an explicit interest to deal with theater as a visual event. Bringing theater studies in close connection with visual studies, it has been argued that theater is an image-producing medium (Jackob & Röttger 2009) that is embedded in historical scopic regimes (Bleeker 2008). As such, theater provides a stage for the image and critically engages with culturally specific practices of looking.
This paper aims to carry this idea further by considering the theater as a space for (re)animating the image, in which images are brought to life within the space and time of a theatrical event. Drawing on W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of the metapicture (1994), the paper analyzes how Romeo Castellucci’s M.#10 Marseille (2004) creates theatrical “thinking images” that carry in them a reflection on their underlying medial operations and visualize how representation works. Moreover, the performance experiments with an animistic attitude toward the image, staging the image as a “living organism” (Mitchell 2005).
Combining a critical exploration of the processes of medialization with the magical animism of watching living images, M.#10 Marseille paves the way for what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called a politics of perception (1999), in which the image is rediscovered as a heterogeneous entity that speaks to the spectator in a self-critical and magical way.