User:Research and Methods

What, how, why

What

Fantasmi di carne (Ghosts of flesh)

1. Corrected version: A sequence of dusty, pictorial screenshots depicts the ambiguous atmosphere of a techno party onto a sound carpet that takes off from the music played by the dj to the humid and melancholic ambient of a church. The viewer is invited to be part of a heterogeneous group of young people who are approached with both panoramic and close up frames by the eye of the camera. Some of the dancers are captured while drinking their beers, some others in the attempt to communicate to the person right next to them - probably failing in drowning out the loud music in the background -, and still others stealing a kiss to a fellow dancer. Their faces are veiled with a sense of rapture as if they were present to themselves but also lost somewhere inside them wether with open eyes or closed onto an inner, personal space. They're swaying continuously in answer to the voice of music like devout Jews in prayer. Sometimes, the grainy texture of the pictures would reveal sharper details of the dancers such as the colour of their eyes, their young beards, or a necklace with a cross charm made of wood. Other times, they would seem to vanish away in vapours of indigo and ochre as if they were shadows. By the time of the video, the attention of the viewer is driven from a collective perspective of the event to the more intimate's of a girl. As she appears on the screen like a byzantine icon, the soundtrack lands to the spiritual chants sang by a choir during a catholic celebration. All the noise in the background will eventually fade into the sound of a rising heartbeat at the end of which the film will end.

1. First draft: A sequence of dusty, pictorial screenshots depicts the ambiguous atmosphere of a techno party onto a sound carpet that takes off from the music played by the dj to the humid and melancholic ambient of a church. “Fantasmi di carne” (Ghosts of flesh) is a short film made of screenshots from video that explores the tight, invisible, indissoluble link between body and soul, between immanence and transcendence.

2. “Il mio volto è carcere d’amore” (My face is prison of love) is an open archive of life portraits composed by a hundred gouache paintings. On each sheet of thin, pale paper the faces of the subjects appear as delicately and gradually as a photograph does during the development phase sometimes to stare at the viewer, sometimes to listen to it. They are formed by spots of black and white - with a rare, furtive intrusion of blue - that naturally expanded on the wet surface of the paper, now dry and wavy.

How

1. The low-quality images of the dancers that follow one another give a sensual, material feeling of their swaying bodies as well as the impression that they’re drifting away from the dance floor to float in the air like electromagnetic waves. They appear - or disappear - in a magma of coloured pixels which are nothing more than a fluxus of data, the most immaterial thing I ever got to experience. The film’s soundtrack is the inner eye through which the shapeless nature of the dancers' souls becomes visible.

Why

1. How something so truly sensual and mindless like a dance in a techno club could reveal itself to be ritual extremely fascinated me. It felt as if the barrier between material and immaterial had vanished away to show a fluidity that escapes the distinction we usually make. Body and soul neither were divided nor submissive to one another but empowered by their coexistence. In “Nudità” (Nudity) Giorgio Agamben wrote about how Christ used to communicate with his disciples. It happened in the form of ‘parables’, stories that described heaven by taking the everyday world as an example. In those stories not only the separation between immanence and transcendence was demolished but the material world that we experience became so essential that humanity would have never been able to reach heaven without it. Similarly, during that techno party, I had the impression that the act of dancing, saturated with sensuality, far removed from any sort of thinking, was the condition that made possible for the dancers to reveal their true nature: luminous souls above swaying bodies.