Festival Opening | Tribunalia - performance di Marcin Dudek

Tacitus charts the crowd’s road to violence: what began as taunts

between Nucerians and Pompeians became shouted abuse, which grew into stone-throwing, and ended with swords and knives. (1)

Marcin Dudek’s Tribunalia is part of the artist’s ongoing investigation into the psychology and rituals of football stadiums. Intrigued by Pompeï’s ancient amphitheatre, which, while in ruins, closely resembles the Polish stadiums of the ‘90s, Dudek reconstructs its architecture using wood and matches inside the courtyard of the Palazzo Vermexio.

The matches are akin to bobbing heads crowded around a spectacle, and are placed according to Dudek’s memory of crowds in his home stadium. This maquette is placed on top of a hollow construction, which is then inhabited by the artist in the manner of a puppeteer hiding below the stage.

As visitors surround the stadium, Dudek reenacts the rituals of the

spectacle, the sounds and gestures of a more and more agitated public.

In the process, the artist depicts the struggle of an individual being

swallowed by the mass, and reflects on the complex nature of crowd

violence.

1 Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.94.