Helbitz Cohen’s current installation functions as an autonomous artistic space, directly responding to Joshua Sobol’s new play, Raft of the Medusa – while at the same providing the setting for presenting monologues from the play in the museum space. The dialogue that has developed between the two artists since their first meeting 12 years ago reaches in the present project a new pinnacle of powerful expression.
Sobol’s play Raft of the Medusa was inspired by the renowned painting by the French painter Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), depicting a horrific event that took place in June 1816, during the journey of the frigate “Méduse” to the port of Saint-Louis in the French colony of Senegal. The ship’s captain, a member of the aristocracy, was given command not because of his professional skills but due to his connections with the Bourbon monarchy. His ship ran aground, and the captain chose to reserve the few xisting lifeboats for members of the senior command and the noblemen among the crew. The other passengers were evacuated to an improvised wooden raft, which was tied to one of the lifeboats. Weighed down by the load, this boat soon cut itself off from the raft, in fact abandoning it and the people on it to their fate, without food or water in the open sea. Many of the raft’s passengers died shorty after – while the survivors experienced violence, despair, insanity and extreme hunger, which pushed some of them to cannibalism.
The scene depicted in Géricault’s painting captures the moment in which the survivors first saw the ship Argus, which eventually rescued them and carried them, battered and broken, to shore. The trial of the captain and the crew, all of whom survived, took place against the backdrop of the widespread publicity given to the shocking accounts written by two of the survivors: the engineer Alexandre Corréard and the surgeon Henri Savigny. The painting Raft of the Medusa therefore became a moral-political indictment, a symbol of the corruption of the monarchic regime and the boundless cruelty of mankind.
Sobol’s play is based on conversations between the painter Géricault and the survivors Corréard and Savigny, in which they recounted the terrible events they had experienced during the 13 days they spent on the raft of the Medusa, wavering between total despondency and a desperate faith in humanity. The play was recently staged at RADA in London, directed by Andrew Visnevski. Three monologues from it will be performed in the museum space as an integral part of the exhibition, at times to be announced.

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