Concept

 

Parnasus is a video that tells a dream. And like all dreams, it comes from a small image nested in the mind. The image is a marble statue white as snow. I've never been driven by the fantasy of Winckelmann that still subdues our imagination. All that white marble disorients me. I feel lost, I need color spots as if they were signs on a map. A misunderstanding, that of Winckelmann, that becomes the metaphor for an even deeper and more dangerous mistake: the illusion that the past, crystallized into a kind of noble and abstract projection, is always better than us, it is always perfect. So in my dream, I return to the statues the color denied. The color is erased by the passage of time as you cancel the losers of history and forget the evils of the world. I return the blood to the ancient statues, and the ferocity and the violence that always pervade human history, in an infinite loop of death and delusion. Absolute and unbearable violence that with their unreal perfection those white icons had perhaps to exorcise. A dream that serves to abstract from the dream, to return to talk about the real world.

 

The video was shot in Cine Ars, the famous laboratory in Cinecittà Film Studios managed by a family that from generations creates props and scenographies for movies. But the growing use of CGI in movies is putting their work in danger, narrowing their field of action and transforming their work into modern archeology. An image of a Time that is already the Past. So I thought to treat the fake statues as 3d graphics, cutting them out from the video frame, rigging them with a 3d skeleton, and animating them. The hand-made Analogic fake but real becomes even more fake while recycling itself to survive the Digital Age.

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