Screening video
An intimate landscape
MACRO, Cinema Room, October 17th 2019
Artists:
Vajiko Chachkhiani, Liryc Dela Cruz, Sirine Fattouh, Randa Maddah, Nuvola Ravera
Curated by Marco Trulli – La ville ouverte
Landscape as a thinking space, as the place where we project our traumas, our anxieties, and our fears. An intimate landscape is a journey through the euromediterranean landscape composed of private sphere, landscape interpretations that blend public space and personal emotions, giving back transformed geographies, psychological landscapes. Visible and invisible identities, memories, paths and borders of the landscape penetrate into the private dimension, activating unexpected combinations, soul revolutions, new sceneries that combine history and fiction. These videos raise some questions about the invisible relation between landscape and our imaginary.
How does the public and the private sphere interfere with and influence our consciousness?
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Il paesaggio come spazio del pensiero, come luogo in cui proiettiamo i nostri traumi, le ansie e le paure. An intimate landscape è un itinerario attraverso il paesaggio euromediterraneo composto da visioni private, interpretazioni del paesaggio che combinano spazio pubblico e sfera personale, restituendo geografie trasformate, paesaggi psicologici. L’identità, la memoria, i varchi e i confini visibili e invisibili del paesaggio penetrano fino alla dimensione privata, determinano combinazioni impreviste, nuovi immaginari che mischiano storia e finzione. Dalla dimensione privata, domestica, fino a quella pubblica, politica, storica. An intimate landscape pone una serie di domande sui temi del paesaggio e dello spazio pubblico attraversati dalla paranoia del controllo, dai traumi della storia o dalla pervasività dell’identità religiosa per giungere fino alla condizione di esilio, di fuga dal proprio paese, di sradicamento.
In che modo la sfera pubblica e quella privata interferiscono e influenzano la nostra coscienza?
Videos
Vajiko Chachkhiani, Winter which was not there, 2017
Sirine Fattouh, A nigh in Beirut, 2005
Liryc Dela Cruz, Handumanan sa Bagyo ug Kinalimtang Yuta/ Memory of the Storm and Forgotten Land, 2019
Randa Maddah, In view, 2017
Nuvola Ravera, Erbario familiare, 2008/13
Vajiko Chachkhiani, Winter which was not there, 2017.
Video, 9′ 00” Co-produced by PinchukArtCentre.
Winter which was not there can be viewed as a metaphor for the liberation of an individual from his or her own history, but in doing so it asks if one can ever be free from one’s image and past, which ultimately defines how we interact in the present. It also raises wider social questions of why historical figures are canonised through the medium of art, and what is the impact on the individual when history eats itself and iconic political and cultural sculptures become obsolete. How does the public and the private sphere interfere with and influence our consciousness?
Liryc Dela Cruz, Handumanan sa Bagyo ug Kinalimtang Yuta/ Memory of the Storm and Forgotten Land, 2019.
Video, 10’ 00.
This film is my reflection on isolation and on spaces that were transformed as a land of incarceration from being a space of refuge. In recent memory, seeing the numbers of eviction and displacement, the place where we live changed as a dystopic image. These acts were used as a performance, a mind conditioning ploy that targets human naivety to intensify fear, violence and madness. How did we get here? From far away, we see a free space, a myth. I invite you to look closer, to look and feel the fragments and invisible borders that we created that tear our society apart.
Nuvola Ravera, Erbario familiare, 2008-2013.
Slideshow – photomontage, Collezione Sergio Bertola.
Erbario familiare is a project built for the collective platform *Habitat. Starting from the autobiography, it explores general topics that transcend the intimate experience of the author. The etymology of the word family refers to members of a home united by blood ties, being the life in common a central aspect for a great number of human beings. The bond between family unity and home seems to be indissoluble, providing the first a sense of belonging for the second, which in return animates it.
Both converge to the larger ground of habitat, being a home to the habitat of the family, and the familiar fabric the natural habitat for its components. In every day’s reality, the family’s anatomy is constantly challenged, for example moving from religious reassurance to new technological and scientific “certainties”.
In this ceaselessly changing scenario, new forms of occupying existence and time are born. Every person I met while growing up assumed the role of a new family member, every place became a home, and at the same time none of it really did. To realize I didn’t belong to what is conventionally called a family has been rather complex; such position of both involvement and detachment brought up a lot of questions about the relational and living condition choices a family makes.
I chose to linger over the line of these impressions, using photography as the mean for understanding the research of a strictly autobiographical theme, placing side by side the personal exploration through photographic gesture and recorded files. Many are the themes mentioned in this family microcosm, all of them about reconfiguration of spaces and being, about centres and fringes. The wish is to accomplish a shift from inner subjective shapes to personal experiences, in order to put these in comparison with the collective experience.
Sirine Fattouh, A night in Beirut, 2006.
Video, 8′ 06”.
In A night in Beirut the artist follows a man in a white robe, “El Tabbal”, for the first time after years of hearing him but never seeing his face, during her childhood spent in Beirut before moving to Paris. Fattouh explains that the trigger for this video was to put a face on a voice that was once a terrifying and mystic sound that broke sharply during the nights of the holy month of Ramadan, creating numerous fantasy stories in the minds of young children.
Randa Maddah, In view, 2017.
Video, 7’07”.
In View focuses on the situation of Golan’s inhabitants today. In it, fragmented shards of mirrors dangle gently in an open window frame, images and light glinting off them. I wanted to reflect on the two control points on each side of the border to one single point – that in which I was standing. Of course, they also reflect all the little everyday details and chaos that comprise living in that place.
