Returning to the Romaeuropa Festival, Giorgina Pi continues with Lemnos a research that intertwines myth, scenography, and a political interrogation of the present. The first chapter of a broader project, the work takes as its starting point the figure of Philoctetes, the hero abandoned on the island of Lemnos because of a wound that makes him unbearable to his community—only for them to return to him years later when they can no longer do without his help. In Pi’s rewriting, Philoctetes is a woman: not a simple gender shift, but an act that reframes myth as a device of exclusion, turning the wound into the point where a body becomes both intolerable and indispensable. Heracles is also a woman, yet stripped of any salvific function, while Odysseus and Neoptolemus remain as embodiments of two forms of masculinity: seasoned strategy and the burden of inheritance. Through original dramaturgy, research materials, journeys, interviews, and a chorus that speaks from the present in ancient Greek, Lemnos does not seek an archaeological rereading of myth, but rather reactivates its force to question what communities expel—and what, nonetheless, they continue to need.
