As long as you don’t soil my floor

Giuliano Scarpinato

'ONE: May I put my heart at your feet?
TWO: As long as you don’t soil my floor
Heiner Muller, Heart Piece

Gioia Montefiori is 47 years old, she is a high school teaching assistant and lives with her elderly mother in the family home. Alessio Benedetti is a 17-year-old student with 12 profiles on Facebook, dreaming of owning a service company in Antibes. Cosimo Comes is a 54-year-old hairdresser, with a beauty salon called "Armonya" and a small dog whose dreams give warnings about the future.
These are the protagonists in a gloomy suburban melodrama, a noir made of fateful repressed memories, clever lies, mirrors and turbulent emotions; and above all of imagination, absconding from reality for the time it takes to crash.

“Se non sporca il mio pavimento takes its inspiration from a recent Italian criminal investigation, the Rosboch case; a story that made a great impression on me, not just for the complicated events, but also for the archetypal power of the characters involved. From the moment I first read about it, it seemed to me that Gloria Rosboch and her young seducer Gabriele Defilippi bizarrely embodied the myth of Echo and Narcissus, in that Piedmontese neighbourhood of supermarkets, cathode ray tubes and the escape offered by social media.

The nymph doomed by Aphrodite to unrequited love until the flesh wastes away and the youth lost in his own reflection were described by Ovid in The Metamorphoses. Vittorio Sermonti said of the tale: "the poem of adolescence as an experience of the shifting nature and vulnerability of identity, while your body continues to change, change itself before your very eyes. And you no longer know who you are”. Without worrying about the degrees of separation between Echo and Narcissus, Gloria and Gabriele, Gioia and Alessio, I would like to talk about this conjunction in the limbo of adolescence. Of that room where identities are blurred, distorted, late to bloom; because everyone returns to it at some point, sooner or later, to be sixteen years old again, with many dreams, and little skill for life".
Giuliano Scarpinato