Chessboards
…
…
The chessboard is a playground. Visually a floor with no patterns would convey the feeling of inconsistency: it could become a slippery floor, one with no reference points, no distinction between near and far, and maybe no clear divide between the sky and the earth.
The checkered floor indicates me precisely where it begins and where it ends, it also makes me recognize any of its irregularities, the lines that cross it make me be sure of bumps and holes, I feel secure on it, and I would definitely better dance with my feet on it rather than choose a one color floor.
It is an horizontal plane traced with charcoal, and painted with thick varnish: the Chessboard, the place where precise and well thought moves are to be made by many pieces. A large checkered floor with actors as elements of the game, could be the parody of a real life battle.
Imagine to stand on this kind of floor, or on a big chessboard where the squares are sufficiently big to contain comfortably both feet of an individual, then you would impersonate one of the pieces of this game: standing there would mean waiting for some check from anywhere, and anytime to come and scatter you away, you are then playing a “life game”.
Look out for your life, be really careful not to stand on the Bishop’s path, or the Tower’s: remember how all the others pieces move, and in what direction they’ll go…
In my video “The Tower Trilogy”, the first part is about a frenetic and intermittent movement of the head of a doll child, trying to deceive and escape from this kind of dangerous external merciless check. It is a mortal check, but until it really comes in, you don’t really know where it comes from, as it always gets its targets by surprise.
Years ago I was observing a friend of mine performing a strange game with his life: after seeing that I decided to set up a scene in my video that would have to convey a sense of “insecure position”, representing an endangered and uncontrolled state in a mad and exessively fast world of betrayal.
This kind of position on the red spot of the checkered floor would have to be clear: the “self”, the piece owned by the viewer, is exposed and threatened by an invisible checker at any time… The Trilogy is about the “loss of control”, a theme that I kept following and developing throughout all of my video work.
The loss of control is a major subject in my visual research, and it is thanks to the possibility of making the images “move” with film and video, that I’ve been able to represent this concept the way I wanted.
…
…
Rain
…
…
…
…
…
In this video the Rain is made out of blood: a constant red rain falls on the vegetation of the town.
Here the concept of violence is not expressed literally with scenes of cruelty, but it is symbolically represented by the never ending rain that exists through the all duration of the film. This video does not present a resolution to this sad scenario, there are only few moments in which the rain stops, and leaves violently shaken by the wind moving in slow motion inhabit the screen.
The violence of the wind is here only a preface to another sad paragraph of rain. Rain starts with bunch of dry leaves and brunches that fall on the floor to subsequently draw the attention to a garden where we see some blood dripping on the grass, and hear a sound of two single notes echoing; at every change of scene there is the falling of a red flower, a brunch or a seed making a sudden dry noise.
This kind of object-falling represents a loss or a sacrifice, or even a sudden waking, that always brings us back to the observing of the red rain. This video does not present a narrative with a beginning, a middle point, and a resolutive end, but it confronts us with the same action repeated over and over in different places, therefore ironically it is like a vinyl record playing always the same music.
The irony of the content adds to the well thought composition of the images, and to the dynamism of some shots: this beautiful imagery is contradicted, and although coexists with the discomfort of the viewing of blood.
…
…
Cyanide
…
…
My film Cyanide has had a peculiar beginning. It originated from a period of my life of extreme depression, and uncertainty, and it was an action I was performing every day that made me think about developing the more predominant images of this film.
I was cycling in the winter through a path covered in dead leaves. I found myself going many times back and forwards along the same path: the leaves had fallen over it from the trees that grew at its right side, and there were so many of them arranged in a rather ordinate way. They cached my eye many times, they nearly became a fixation to me: the vision of these leaves coming towards me and passing by, as I drove away, became very important.
They surely must have had a meaning which I could not grasp, but they were also nice to look at, and shiny. I could not find an answer to many of the questions about my life at that time, and usually, when things get so hard, I tend to turn to images for a possible explanation, or an answer; it might sound silly, but things, objects, images, places can talk to you, even if they do not communicate through spoken language, neither they are rational or clear, even if they only give you a hint, or a confused indication, they can help you to put the events you are experiencing in a different perspective.
I do not know today the meaning of those leaves, but looking at them was enough to make me develop Cyanide.
…
Maybe Cyanide is about the world that’s being poisoned, but there is more to it. It is about acknowledging death: observing up to nausea everything you do not understand, or that bit that puzzles your mind. Many leaves on the footpath may mean a repeating pattern, a recurring event, the same signification over and over through a crazy journey. Once you have printed into your consciousness that particular shape you can start to remember about it in order to recognize it the next time it crosses your way. That is why the many leaves wouldn’t go away… Even if they are the supreme detached element, it is their image that would not really detach. A residual part of the dying thing had to stick to my head as departure and separation is always a painful experience. It is possible that the sticky image of whatever is “gone” is just an anchor, a secure place, for the stability of what stays close: that bit that cannot afford to go within the subject. There are no limits to what can go wrong, in fact in this video, as well as the many repeating patterns, occasionally other frightening elements appeared on my imaginary way: those red bones are reminiscent of previously consumed meals, crashed mirrors of impacts, and keys are the possibility of a way out. What is left within the self, together with all its impressions and images, is the way out to freedom. It is very hard to see freedom into such a dark and constrained scenery, with trashed particles, and that unbearable sense of claustrophobia, there is no clean rain here to clear dust from the mourning stage, and the rain is black and mean, in fact the last action does not suggest freedom at all, it rather looks more like a total eradication of the “walking being”, the viewer/author is pushed away together with the large amount of leaves, the search for a way out is only an imagined possibility here, only a hope behind the door…
Pessimism in art is always an attempt to make viewers aware of the worst possible unfolding of the events.
The Tower Trilogy
…
…
The Tower Trilogy has three titles that originated in Italian: “La Torre, Le Formiche, Lo Specchio” and they translate this way in english : “The Tower, The Insects, The Mirror”. This animation is made with 16 mm film, and DV video, and it is very abstract although some figures appear on the screen at some points.
It is a work in which I explore the state of hysteria. The first piece, “La Torre”, is a 3D animation presenting a claustrophobic space in which some objects rotate on themselves on a chequered floor. In this piece there is an atmosphere of emergency and “loss of control”: the doll’s head spins on itself faster and faster in this dark space where a sense of prisony and oppression is staged by the absence of windows or doors, and a first stage of hysteria here is identified with the worms crossing the room.
The theme of hysteria manifests more overtly in the struggle of the second section “Le Formiche”, in which a succession of images of shaking hair, falling flowers, black paint on canvas, and frenetic body movements inhabit the screen. With the obsessive shaking of the head of a real performer, this part also represents a moment of denial but at the same time a process of purification.
The third part of the trilogy, “Lo Specchio”, revolves around the theme of death in a settings very similar to the first piece “La Torre”, just this time the atmosphere in the room with the chequered floor has changed, because the struggle and the tension are now gone. Also the light is different, from night it has become day, the sunlight reached the room as if a window finally opened up in it.
While some dead flowers keep falling from the sky/ceiling together with fragments of mirror making a dry sound, everything else is unmoving until we see an outburst of rain: the sole element that can clean and restore hope to the sense of anguish of the entire film.
The Checkered Tunnel
…
…
The Checkered Tunnel is a animation made entirely with 3D software. This short movie represents a fragmented space made of a chequered tunnel where the squares that fill its walls, floor, and ceiling alternate from red to white (the colour red is a metaphor for trauma).
At the opening of the piece the point of view of the spectator (the camera) is turning on itself in a chequered room with a missing wall leading to a black void. The camera moves back and forward unsure if to dive into the unknown darkness, or to stay in the trapping room with no other exits. Once the camera makes its move into the dark void, it suddenly encounters a chequered woman (her skin looking like the surrounding space reminds us of the chameleon’s mimicry) that soon goes out of the frame to enter a tunnel full of curved metal surfaces and mirrors.
This trip into a fragmented reality full of intense lights and reflections that, like obstacles, have to be avoided, and that create a blinding effect, ends into a bigger room which looks like a real chessboard where a chess piece with a woman’s head on its top (The Queen), trapped into a muddle of slowly moving worms, turns on itself while the other objects nearby – a dice, and some bishops – rest motionless.
The atmosphere of this place is surreal, the camera at one point turns away from The Queen and moves forward towards a cylindrical container with some illegible words printed on it, before moving into the dark exit of the room.
Reptilica
…
…
Reptilica is partly animation and partly a film where real people perform. It Starts with a doll which is animated with the stop motion technique, she is searching through the many dry leaves that rest on the floor, something she has seen or felt passing by, but she can’t seem to find it.
Other scenes in the movie introduce small pink worms falling on a group of ivy leaves, these are the disturbing presence that bother the doll as they sneak under the leaves, never letting themselves to be seen. These worms might be imaginary creatures belonging to the same fragmented body of the doll/woman.
The doll’s actions alternate with those of a real woman, which is also searching through the leaves, and her movements at some stage of the film become frenetic: she tries to cover her body with the plants as if to operate an impossible symbiosis with nature.
