Reinterpreting the film's theme, the performance project centers around a structure "illegally" built in an open space overnight and then demolished by micro-explosive charges at dawn the next day. The real-time video documentation of the structure's construction and demolition forms the central component in this video installation that cites two other famous films, De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951) and King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949), from which audio and video sequences are taken and reworked to counterpoise collectivism and individualism through different layers of analysis. The performance directs attention to the role collectivism plays when a collective task is seen through to its end: successful completion of building the structure within a given time encompasses the structure's demolition. As an integral part of the building design, the final collapse accelerates and completes the construction cycle; it does not meet a basic need for durability over time but rather that of integrity with its own task.
While in De Sica's The Roof the people are ready to commit an illegal action in order to satisfy the basic needs of an individual (shelter), in his Miracle in Milan the people live at the margins of society, united by a momentary need (a ray of sunlight to warm themselves) and share a common lot of poverty. In contrast, in The Fountainhead, it is an individual (a visionary architect) who commits a crime when he dynamites a structure he designed and which others built ignoring his stylistic specifications. A gesture of resistance that manifests not a basic need of a group but rather that of an individual: integrity with one's own project.
The installation soundtrack is an audio performance that evokes abstract concepts such as "architecture as rhythm" and "construction as music" and is produced by a sound tone generator that creates different types of sound with various computer algorithms; an installation of micro-charge explosions in gelatin shows a "frozen" collapse in the first seconds of its dynamics, as in a video photogram where the accent is on the force of falling and not on the moment of the fall.
The technical experiment, technological application, and knowledge of materials and their reactions are necessary instruments for studying the methodologies and aesthetics of two fundamental paradigms: construction and collapse. These paradigms are linked to a conceptual line that draws on the concept of work or strain hardening, a metallurgical process by which metals are stressed beyond the yield point, making them stiffer, less elastic and subsequently more fragile: the phase just before failure and collapse. The term "work hardening" acquires a meaning that conveys both scientific and moral connotations: moral connotations insofar as attention is directed to a force exerted against a capability to withstand it: resistance against threats. And since resistance involves intent, we may draw parallels between the behaviour of materials and that of humans.
THE INTERVENTIONS
Performance INDEXICALE
From elaborating the concepts contained in the De Sica "Il tetto" is the idea of a performance in which a group of people (workers of the place where the work is presented) build over night an architecture in a outdoor space (like a fallow-abandoned field). The architecture built (using construction materials such as cellular concrete blocks and iron) is blown up with explosive micro-charges the next morning at sunrise.
Those in charge of construction are workers of varying ages and origins who are asked to participate on a voluntary basis following a phase of involvement and introduction to the project through the communication of motivations and the sense of the project itself.
It is a performative action that wants to focus attention on the role of a community to which is assigned a task to its extreme development: the ability to complete the construction of the architecture on time here is aimed at its destruction. The collapse is part of the construction project and not react to it has the value of consciousness or the void of indifference and the lack of judgement or morality, while the explosion turns into pure artistic gesture.
The collapse accelerates and completes a cycle of construction, it doesn't satisfies a durable basic need than that of fidelity to its task.
The architecture partially collapsed (using the techniques of "controlled demolition") remains in subsequent days as a residual installation. The whole construction phase and the subsequent collapse is live shot and transmitted in real time throughout its duration within a museum space (or an indoor space that can be enjoyed by an audience). If what you're seeing in video is really and in that moment going on, is not explained.
This video element is a piece of a broader intervention that develops within the same space and which includes other installations and performances.
Video-Installation DAS ANDERE
In addition to the element video just described, is expected to set up in the space an installation referring to two other major films: "Miracolo a Milano" by the same De Sica (1951) and "The Fountainhead" by King Vidor ( 1949) from which extrapolating and reworking some significant audio and video sequences with the goal of linking different levels of analysis of the concepts of community and individual.
If in the film by De Sica Il tetto there is a community ready to take an illegal action to satisfy a basic need of an individual (to have a house), in Miracolo a Milano is a community that lives on the margins, united by the needs of the moment (a ray of sunshine to warm) and by a common destiny of misery. In The Fountain head instead an individual performs an illegal action: the destruction by explosives of an architecture that he designed but built by others will not respects its stylistic directions, a strong gesture to satisfy an equally primary need that is not need of the community but of the individual himself, loyalty to his own project goes to bind to the video-installation a live action that moves the focus on the concepts of time and resistence.
Performance ECHO
A model of the real architecture that is being built is blown up, with explosive micro-charges, inside a plexiglas display case filled with a special gelatin. The ratio of forces that creates between the violence of the explosion, the nature of the material used for the model and the ability of the gelatin to absorb the blast, causes the visual effect of a real "freezing" of the collapse in the first instant of its happening like in a frame from a video sequence.
Going to fix a precise moment in time of a dynamic that would be exhausted very quickly, it amplifies the force, but the force of the event, not of the explosion itself. It is a moment stolen from the flow of life, but is not the image of the decisive moment (the final collapse), is an instant dilated, a frame that has been, that is and still will be, blocked because of a resistance, resistance of a weak material as that of gelatin, but that "threat".
As the sentence of deconstructionist philosopher Derrida says "the resistance concerns what threat", freeze the collapse is "resist", is "threatening".
For a better understanding of the physical effect of what described, refer to other similar trials recently conducted by Portage (www.portage.it - "Gelatina Stills").
Performance TRIBUTE TO ANFIONE
It completes the intervention project a second performance that acts as a "soundtrack" to the whole project and that goes to tap the more abstract concepts of architecture like rhythm and construction like music, through an instrument that uses the informatic algorithm as the generating element of a sound.
Tribute to Anfione involves infact the development of one or more "sound tables" of glass on which some lines of gunpowder, drawed live, burning, generate sounds. This is a technique under development, where the luminous trail generated by the burning powder is read by a set of softwares that interpret the position and trajectory, associating to them some different arrays of generation and processing of sounds. The result will be a real "concert for gunpowder" where the visual and gestural drawing remains as a residual trace of a sound
composition that was. Is investigated here the mythical idea of building, it tells the myth that Anfione with the beauty of his music charmed the stones that voluntarily moved to build the walls of Tebe.
A first phase of testing on Tribute to Anfione was initiated during a residence at Inteatro in Polverigi (december 2009) where we worked on the development of communication between the reading devices of the video signal and those processing and generating sounds.
The show is taking place in the framework of the project "Focus on Art and Science in the Performing Arts" with the support of Culture Programme of the European Commission.
by PORTAGE
Enrico Gaido <> Alessandra Lappano
in collaboration with:
Riccardo Dondana - applied explosives technologies
Yann Gioria - sound effects
Fulvio Montano - camera/ video editing
Kimitake Sato - installations
