Il Capitale – un libro che ancora non abbiamo letto

On 9 July 2021, the entire workforce of GKN Driveline, an automotive supplier located near Florence, receives an email dismissing them with immediate effect. Consequently, the workers occupy their factory in Campi Bisenzio and fight as the Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN against its closure. The occupation results in the formation of a broad alliance of workers, climate activists and scientists all calling for an ecological transformation of production at the factory.

Enrico Baraldi and Nicola Borghesi, who together form the theatre collective Kepler-452, heard about this radical class struggle and visited the striking workers. They wanted to read »Das Kapital« by Karl Marx with them. How could an artistic dialogue be established between the most famous work of political economics and the factory strike? The theatre makers quickly become aware of the vast distance between theory and practice, between the life of art and the world of work. Despite this, or perhaps exactly because of it, Kepler-452 decided to collaborate with some of the workers to create a play about how they tried to bring Marx’s »Das Kapital« (Capital) to the stage: that is »a book that we haven’t yet read«, as the play’s subheading self-deprecatingly puts it. In the play, the workers talk about themselves, their lives and, above all, about what effect it had on them when production at their factory was suspended.

With »Il Capitale—un libro che ancora non abbiamo letto«, the Kepler-452 collective is introducing itself to German audiences for the first time. Founded in Bologna in 2015, the group’s theatrical reportages explore actual experiences of social reality on stage using a wide variety of formats. Together with workers from the Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN, they have developed a play about time and its value: who owns it, who controls it and how can we free it again to tell our own stories?