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'Myein' is an A/V and dance performance that traverses different temporalities and narrative levels about the mediatic use of images, approached through Riccardo Santalucia’s audiovisual composition and Gloria Dorliguzzo choreography. The performance features photographies of the Early Netherlandish paintings as a source material to rethink our relation with past iconographies and aesthetics. By reinterpreting these images through modern image-processing techniques, the artists intention is to set a visual journey that challenges national mytholigies and activates procecces of cultural reterritorialization.
The approach here is radically punk but well-crafted: the artworks from the get digitally reinvented, even torned. Starting from their colours, it is as if a geological time-lapse guided us through different climatic eras. First we see the earth covered in eruption, then its deep freeze. The performer seeks ritual gestures able to craft a meaning for the nowness, but we don’t know whether it discovers a blessing or a witchcraft. Through different forms of acceleration and deceleration, conceived as a score of images, sounds and gestures, viewers are accompanied in a journey where the idea of becoming part of a fluid body arises, abandoning figurativeness and fixed symbologies.
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As all around we sample and archive reality through technological means, and as we detach physical involvement in the experience of our history and reality, what uses can we make of these data collections? Are they just food for AI? Seeking answers to these questions, Riccardo Santalucia developed a personal coding practice to sample images and displace and shapeshift them retaining their color details. It's approach goes beyond a documentaristic or archive-like approah, toward a more personal reading of where images can bring us and what is their meaning for us today. The presence of a performer here is meant to accompany the audience toward the virtual realm unfolded by the video, while experimenting possible relations between the physical precence and the moving image.
‘No Flags No Wind’ is a lecture-performance composed of Riccardo Santalucia's theory- and practice-based research on the pratice of flag waving. The performance is composed of live actions, listening sessions, robot prototypes and collective excercise, resulting in an audiovisual and poetic essay on the use of our hands, their electrical prostheses and human obsolescence.
It all starts with flags. Whether they are choreographic instruments or tools for live-tracking the movement of the breeze, in this context flags become narrative devices. Within them, different media, swarms of drones that acts as robotic flag-wavers, experimental animation, electromagnetic field recordings and fanfare rhythms meet to explore and speculate on the progressive lost of human agency due to automated systems.
Following his experience as an apprentice flag-thrower in the flag-throwing group of Sansepolcro (IT), the artist began to invent new possible relationships between flags and wind, hacking their signalling and symbolic properties. At first he was struck by the celebrative and communitu binding strenght of this practice altogether with the proudness expressed by the flag wavers and the corehographu of textiles. Secondly, he was fascinated by how fictional the history of flag wavers came to be, entangled between touristic, military and religious origins.