mittelfest tabù

18-27 July 2025

The taboo prohibitions lack all justification and are of unknown origin. Though incomprehensible to us they are taken as a matter of course by those who are under their dominance.

Sigmund Freud, Totem and taboo

“Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb thy golden stair.” And with these words, the fairy tale tells us, every day the sorceress would enter the tower where she had locked the sweet Rapunzel: no other entrance, no stairs, no doors, but a small isolated window in the woods. There, the young woman spent her life: that window was the boundary never to be crossed. Beyond the sorceress, nothing could leave and nothing should penetrate. Until the day a boy passed by and was enraptured by Rapunzel’s unexpected song. Upon seeing the tower and spying the sorceress, with her rhyme to enter, he managed by deception to break the ban: holding onto the girl’s long golden hair, the young man climbed the tower and slipped through the window. When Rapunzel saw him, she did not feel terror, nor anger, but a new, unknown feeling: and so in secret the boy would return, whenever he could, more and more often, until the sorceress discovered them. Rapunzel had violated the spell of the tower in the woods: she was banished to the desert, while the boy lost the sight with which he had contemplated love. But love has a powerful sight, which goes beyond any prohibition, written or unwritten: so it was that, after a long wandering, it led the young man into the desert and brought him first Rapunzel and then his sight. Once one spell was broken, another was casted.

Silent are the taboos, which, like Rapunzel in her fairy tower, let you look at the world within the frame of a definite window: thus they draw the invisible boundary between the eyes and what is disturbing, what is forbidden or dangerous, while they also give substance to the sacred and safe place where you can peacefully pause.

Yet taboos move, once again silently: they thus move, by the magic of an encounter and without uttering new or further words, the boundary of what must remain secret and what can become manifest. And so in geography and in history, taboos define the unspoken rules with which humanity endows itself. And what are the taboos in which we live in our latitudes and in this time of the long human history? What enigmas, pains, allegiances, prohibitions and desires, limits, dreams or fears mark our boundaries?

Taboos and their mystery, clear and unknown to those who live them, incomprehensible and obvious to those who are not subject to them, are the unwritten laws on which the fascinating and fearsome magic of our varied world, more elusive than transparent, rests. Perhaps, without taboos, there is no humanity. To those who want the pleasure of discovering it.

Giacomo Pedini
Artistic Director Mittelfest

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