Schegge d’Incanto in Fondo al Dubbio (Enchantment Splinters on the Bottom of Doubt), is a video-audio installation retro-projected on two big screens within the Italian Pavilion at the 53rd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
The work wants to conceptually represent such themes as struggle and alarm, love and vanity. Fight is here intended as a personal and moral research of meaning, hyphening its existential nature. The man (the Spanish actor Ramon Tarès) is alone in a white landscape under the slopes of a Mont Blanc glacier. Alone, he struggles against an enormous black parachute, inflated by a harsh blowing wind. The black parachute (vanity) doesn’t stop swelling; the battle has started and will never end. It is a ‘superficial’ struggle, a fight against oneself for the triumph of vanity and strength. This small daring act (the small man defies nature, wind, exhaustion and the parachute vastness) recalls the myth of Sisyphus, condemned for eternity, to the absurd repetition of a gesture. The woman instead (Italian actress Sonia Bergamasco), swims lost in a boundless sea. In one hand she wears a sturdy metal hook linked to a number of steel cables ending at the sea bottom, all secured to a number of beds, tables, cupboards, closets, which represent a synthetic metaphor of home fittings. The woman’s fight is dramatically different; it is the struggle to avoid the sinking into the darkness of the sea deepness the value of union, of family, the inner meaning of things we live and believe in as a home, a relationship. The woman swims, exhausted, dragging an enormous black ‘jelly-fish’ made of objects and steel cables, she swims until she finds an abandoned stone surfacing pedestal in the middle of the sea. After climbing it, she lights a red smoke candle, one of those used to signal danger, distress or wrecking.
The woman takes on her the duty of alarm humanity, to point out and highlight with her gesture the fall of values, the weakening of will, the loss of sense.