Vertigine: Settings, atmospheres and emotions

/ Etna. Exterior. Dawn

From darkness to light.
A landscape of black earth and lava in the bare, colourless, primordial dawn. There is an apparent calm and sense of peace. The silence is broken only by the wind and the birds. But the landscape still smokes; we can feel it boiling at its core. The moving earth breathes. Light grows and clearly separates the white of the air from the black of the land. This is an ancient landscape of memory and dreams. An inner landscape in silent movement.
A figure appears with the landscape. Not in it, but besides it. She is thinking of it, or maybe dreaming of it or remembering it. It is a crude figure, just like the landscape, with the whitest skin and the blackest hair. Oriental, beautiful and cold, with narrow eyes hiding thoughts and emotions.
Memories are born that we can guess at, but not understand. They tell of fragments of history whose theme is light and space.

/ Hong Kong, Man Mo Temple, Interior, Evening

Days gone by. A Buddhist temple whose ceiling is covered by smoking votive spirals. The light is fragmented in an atmospheric dust of vapours. The space is indefinite, mobile and kaleidoscopic, with concentric, spiral movement. A light of the spirit.

/ Catania, Palazzo Biscari, Interior, Day

Another history that interlinks with the one above. Another space and another light. A Baroque palace encrusted with sensual, voluptuous decorations as only Sicilian palazzi can be. It has a touch of the decadent, excessive and yet also magnificent. Here the light is fragmented by gigantic chandeliers in Venetian glass, amplified by mirrors and dissolved in the stucco and furnishings.
The music is sweet, romantic and tugs at the heart strings, like the music enjoyed by young people today – raucous, dirty and discordant. A troubled yet serene song. It speaks of the earth, but is made up of fragments of broken memories. It grows, unstable, with the dizzying spaces and then, unexpectedly, it returns clear and serene, while the figure identifies and superimposes with the landscape. The figure is the landscape. The circle closes.

/ Etna. Exterior. Day

When the landscape/figure explodes slowly and sweetly, it is not the volcano that launches lapilli into the air, but it is the image itself that shatters and slowly disintegrates. It flies into the empty space in a long, suspended period of time.
Before and after, in the real space of the projection, there are material, organic lamps that pulse with intermittent light. Before being objects of design and tools for illumination, they are primordial bodies that give the light form, spectators of the cyclic construction and destruction that occurs all around them. They are stable, silent witness and bringers of light in this dizzying landscape.