Stratagemmi 49 | Berlin-Twarkowski: Tel Quel. Quattro parole per attraversare autenticità e falsificazione in True Copy e in Rohtko di Alessandro Iachino e Virginia Magnaghi

This article examines the theme of artistic forgery in two recent theatrical works: True Copy (2018) by the Belgian company Berlin, and Rohtko (2022) by Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, co-written with dramaturg Anka Herbut. While the former stages the real-life story of Dutch forger Geert Jan Jansen, the latter reconstructs the Knoedler Gallery scandal, in which fake paintings attributed to Mark Rothko and other Abstract Expressionist masters were sold to collectors for millions of dollars. Read in dialogue, the two works offer complementary and at times opposing responses to a shared question: what makes an artwork authentic, and who holds the power to determine it. The analysis is structured around four conceptual categories — Investigation, Workshop, Multiplication, Failure — each naming a phase in the trajectory that forgery traces before, and sometimes after, its exposure. Drawing on dramaturgical and scenographic analysis, and engaging with theoretical references ranging from Nelson Goodman’s reflections on forgery and aesthetic experience to the broader «Tel Quel» debate on objects, reproduction and value, the article argues that the two works together map a significant shift in contemporary theatre’s engagement with the art market: from the burlesque exposure of its absurdities to a more radical diagnosis of a system in which the distinction between original and fake has not merely been complicated, but structurally dissolved.