User:Research and Methods

Session one: What, how, why

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, a plastic glass held by delicate fingers as if it was a precious chalice, 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. The texture of the low-quality images of the dancers that follow one another as in a baroque parade 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 digital information, a fluxus of data, paradoxically the opposite of the tangible bodies o the dancers. The film’s soundtrack is the inner eye through which the shapeless nature of the dancers' souls becomes visible. 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.

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. 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. 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.

“Il mio volto è carcere d’amore” (My face is prison of love)

2. First draft:“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. Because of the low-quality of the support on which water and gouache were applied, the portraits keep changing in time colourwise and shape-wise. During the realisation, nothing came in the way of the meeting between the author and the subjects' eyes: as for the painting, both of them turned liquid under the pressure of each gentle brushstroke to pour themselves into each other like in a wineskin. Life portraiture offers the possibility to create an intimate, intense atmosphere that connects the artist to the subjects as if they were reflecting their images into each other's eyes so deeply that it made me question if I was painting their portraits or my own.

Session two: Reviewing self-directed research

Stage 2: b (Anh) interviews a (Annalisa) - What are you making? I have been writing for two years, every day on black diaries that looks all the same. In the beginning I had divided them into poetry and proses, however I revisited this limitation and discontinued the division and merged the writing. What was more important were the pages and the act of writing itself. It is an intimate chronicle of nightmares, dreams. Why are you making it? Due to inactivity creatively, I wanted to still participate and found that writing was a means to be connected to creativity. I had too much on my mind and it had to go somewhere; I could not keep it in. It helped me to look at things at a distance. Spiritual in the everyday life. To create something concrete and tangible. At the moment I am writing on two topics, an interrupted love story that never began, questioning if my treatment of this person is right or good enough, and my prays to God. Does to relate to other things you have done? Yes. My approach to it, observing point of view, things reveal themselves in a profound, simple way. Praying by writing. Images come out of it as reflections, poetic. The process is the same as the past. How is it different to other things you have done? This is freer. My attitude towards writing everyday is strict and military. My writing is a source of material to draw from as if it was wineskin, to grab a drink at anytime. But I do not know where it is heading however I am no longer writing poetry. The last poem that was written was a violent poem. What are the most significant choices have you made recently? Rarely do I read this writing, at times I forget it completely. The one time I did read it I did not recognized the person in the writing, as though I never wrote it and it was a different person. The next step, the presentation of the work gets in the way. I want it to find a form or shape with editing and objectivity. Dare, risk. What way will the audience receive this. I am not writing a novel. The notebook is battlefield about reality, dramatic, tension, a way to reduce the gap between people. I need the gesture, rhythm, extremely physical experience of writing.