Concept
A man, standing in front of a swimming pool. It’s possible to see his body and his reflection on the water. He leaps dressed. His image remains frozen, time stops for him. Only reflections and movements are visible on the water surface. His body gradually disappears, only to reappear in the middle of the pool and move away, naked, into the woods he came from.
What happens in those minutes of suspension? Is he crossing a dimension in which real and imaginary coexist? Immobility is only apparent, and allows us to imagine initiatory paths between water and land, deserts and woods.
Video Sound Art, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, pays homage to the unforgettable THE REFLECTING POOL. Bill Viola’s great video work from 1977 is the most complete and clear representation of man’s relationship with the world, it anticipates the concepts of dislocation and heterogeneity of space.
The tenth edition of the festival offers a look at the possibilities of representation of the postmodern landscape, in search of places that are outside of every place, that exist beyond the coordinates of time and geographic space. They are not unique characteristics of our time: from theater, capable of going beyond the physical presence, to the ship, a “floating fragment of space, place without place”, poetic geography has always been part of us.
We walk for long distances, with our minds we swim through spaces, standing still we reconstruct places with memory. The journey becomes an interior one, an encounter with myths and distant destinations. The postmodern man tries to reconstruct the space around him starting from his own bodily experience, but he is too used to be everywhere and nowhere, to fluctuate between combinations. It was 1985 and the young fauna portrayed in the Postmodern Weekend by Pier Vittorio Tondelli screamed “I still have everything to put on”, while exploring landscapes built of musical genres and social groups. Tondelli’s solitary traveler crosses Europe, the Mediterranean and the Italian provinces, gets lost in contemplation, looks at reality through the filter of a window in search of a way to live.
Laura Lamonea
X edition
The Reflecting Pool
16 September – 1 October Romano swimming pool
16 October – 16 November Cozzi swimming pool
With the support of:
Fondazione Cariplo
Regione Lombardia
Directorate of Cultural Affairs of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile (DIRAC)
With the contribution of:
MiBACT
With the patronage of:
Comune di Milano
Partner:
Milanosport
Touring Club Italiano
In collaboration with:
Le Cannibale
Sentieri Selvaggi
Rosso film
Lake Como Film Festival
Filmmaker Festival