BEYOND – A Journey into the Mind of Adolf Wölfli

Adolf Wölfli, one of the great draftsmen of the 20th century, was born in a small town in the Canton of Bern and began drawing as a patient at the Bern mental illness clinic around 1899. After a tough childhood (a chronically alcoholic and violent father who leaves the family when Adolf is six, poverty, separation from his mother and then the news of his mother's death at the age of nine, mistreatment and inability to attend school), Wölfli grows up as a Verdingbub, a child contracted out to various farmers. After two attempts to rape minors, in 1890 he was sentenced to two years in prison, which he serves at the Sankt Johannsen penitentiary. Following a third attempted rape, he is committed to the Waldau psychiatric clinic (1895). At age 35, in 1899, he began drawing, writing and composing.

BEYOND – A Journey into the Mind of Adolf Wölfli traces this story: from childhood struggles to the creation of his enormous body of work, consisting of over 1,500 drawings and collages, 25,000 pages of literary works and musical compositions.

To narrate the multifaceted Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) and penetrate his revolutionary world, we use voice, movement, dance, music, rhythm, and projections as intricate and elaborate as the elements of his multifaceted paintings, which incorporate musical staves, collages, numbers, and words in addition to drawings.

Luca Massaroli and Baptiste Vurlod lead a small audience into an intimate encounter with the madness, creation, and enthusiasm of this visionary who anticipated Warhol, Picasso, Apollinaire, Man Ray, Dalí, Magritte. Almost illiterate, he could barely write and do sums as taught at primary school, yet, using only paper and coloured pencils, he explored a fantasised world of colours, words, and music beyond space and time, free from any artistic reference to his era and giving life to a brilliant work.

In collaboration with Hilar Stadler, Superintendent of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, and Prof. Dr. med. Werner Strik, director of the University Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Bern, the production immerses itself in the world of Adolf Wölfli and his work to create a theatrical Wunderkammer.

Adolf Wölfli (Luca Massaroli, Baptiste Vurlod) – The protagonist. His story is told through his texts and his paintings.

Dr. Walter Morgenthaler (Luca Massaroli) – The psychiatrist and psychotherapist who takes care of Adolf Wölfli. He provides him with a space to freely express himself to create and compose his artistic and musical works.

Adolf Wölfli, having been expelled from a hostile and brutal world, crossed the border, the Borderline, to create a new world for himself, a world in which he could live. By inventing a different past for himself, he was able to create a new life; a life with an imaginary history, a life that was only possible in a new, different reality from the brutal one; a reality that was his own, cheerful, a reality in which he could transform pain into colours, screams into notes, and nightmares into words; a reality that the people who remained on the other side of the border, the Borderline, called madness.

In creating BEYOND – A Journey into the Mind of Adolf Wölfli, we are specifically interested in this passage, this crossing of a boundary that separates the world that adheres to social norms from the one where other rules, other types of logic, other needs, and other ways of behaving apply. This crossing from one side to the other of the borderline is always dictated by immense pain resulting from enormous suffering. To put it the other way around: without pressure, without vital necessity, and suffering, humans would not cross this type of boundary. In the case of Adolf Wölfli, this pressure from immense suffering was enormous. Fortunately, despite all the accompanying problems, he found refuge and protection from the brutal external realities, allowing him to transform the darkness of past horror into light and artistic expression.

Despite having been committed for schizophrenia at the age of thirty-one, Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) achieved artistic greatness in his cell at the Waldau asylum near his native Bern in Switzerland. The artist has exerted a profound influence on modern art ever since.

Working principally in pencil on newsprint, Wölfli created a dense and superbly detailed melody of wildly imaginative prose texts interwoven with poems, musical compositions, colour illustrations and collages. His five-part masterwork, “Skt. Adolf-Riesen-Schöpfung”, comprises forty-five large-format volumes and sixteen notebooks – twenty-five thousand pages in all – containing 1,620 drawings and 1,640 collages.

The art historian Elka Spoerri (1924–2022) was the founder of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, which administers the legacy of the artist and is based at the Kunstmuseum Bern. With tenacity and sensitivity, she promoted, through numerous exhibitions, the work and deeper understanding of Wölfli’s immense artistic output.

BEYOND – A Journey into the Mind of Adolf Wölfli is the first production within BORDERLINES, the multi-year theatre and artistic research project of the Markus Zohner Arts Company.

Notes for the Audience

We recommend booking your tickets well in advance. Due to the intimate nature of the play, the number of seats is limited.

This production contains strong language and adult themes, including references to mental illness, slavery and sexual abuse.

There is a strict no-latecomer policy for this show due to its quiet, intimate nature.

To host BEYOND – A Journey into the Mind of Adolf Wölfli at your theatre, festival or cultural venue, contact the production.