Marta Cuscunà — La Medium

With La Medium, Marta Cuscunà continues her research into scenic craftsmanship, figure theatre, and experimentation, returning to confront the dispositifs of power and the historical roots of gender-based violence. At the centre of the performance lies the true story of Hersilie Rouy, daughter of the illusionist Charles Rouy (famous for The Invisible Woman act, in which women were made to disappear inside magical boxes), who was confined to a psychiatric asylum for fourteen years. During her imprisonment, Hersilie wrote a diary-denunciation with her own blood, recording the abuses she endured and becoming the rebellious voice of the women interned at La Salpêtrière, a symbolic site of nineteenth-century psychiatry and of the study of female hysteria. Through illusionism, séances, Neapolitan puppetry ( guarattelle ), and technological devices, Cuscunà constructs a scenic imaginary that brings to light the “invisible women” of both performance and nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions. Here, magic is not used to produce wonder, but to make what has been removed visible. Hersilie’s story—who after her release succeeded in influencing the reform of the 1838 French law on involuntary confinement—becomes the starting point for a lucid reflection on emancipation, resistance, and memory, as well as on the mechanisms through which institutions discipline, erase, and silence female bodies.