Documentary, 2020
A set of colors and gestures, sensations and moods, words and sounds, alternate with an intimate dialogue that touches stories of pain all connected by scars.
The filmic and performative act comes from a meeting that Daniela and Alessandro decide to have at Daniela’s beach house, a neutral place for both that allows them to activate a dialogue through which the two enter each other’s scars and they do intercourse in an intimate and spontaneous state. The place therefore also becomes an amplifier of the emotional stages that alternate in all their complexity. It is Daniela who talks about herself in this dialogue, and it is through her that the two abandon themselves to the conditions that pain itself imposes. The dialogue is therefore to be understood as a sort of disjoint confrontation in terms of the devices put in place. The plan of the relationship itself serves to actively those processes of catharsis which remain useful to singularities.
This big sea
It was around 2013 when I first had this dream
The Tsunami
I dreamed of a sea, getting bigger and bigger, so big that a wave of inordinate proportions rose. The sky and the sea were dark. I found myself along with some boxes, a on a raft in the middle of that immense dark sea, alone. The raft rode the wave. It did us no harm. The wave, the water did not even reach us. It was all dark, but also bright as if there was a moon. I was not scared, I felt empty but I felt confident. As there was no danger, I felt serene.
My hair were blowing in the wind, I was floating on the wave. I was going to the left, that is, the image of the dream was from a lateral perspective. These boxes are for my daughters Alice and Camilla, they contain the documents that I received from my parents' inheritance. There are the guidelines which I am still writing for them. They describe my values and the weight that I inherited, which I would like to make lighter for my daughters.
Daniela is a woman in constant contradiction with her surroundings. During her life, she has learned to build significant emotional and relational superstructures. This woman stands up with her actions and with her stories throughout anarchical, precise and at times confused or perhaps just instinctive positions.
System of Relationships
A Daniela
//Notes for a film
I am experiencing cancer.
I feel the framework of my relationships is mutating, as much as the way I observe them.
Genetical processes transform these relationships into images and sounds.
Sounds, I recognise them in words.
Images, I spot them into gestures.
I nourish myself with the desire to compensate swellings with emptying.
The matter slowly turns into shreds, and I reuse it to remember.
And the memory which became imagery turns into creation.
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
(from lat. Something is a sign only because it is interpreted as a sign of something by some interpreter)
After a surgical suture, a scar stands out between the flaps of the skin. Isidore of Seville once claimed that scars help to hide wounds from the eye of the viewer. However, they almost seem to underline them at the same time. A scar is a mark engraved on the skin, which seems to reclaim its origin. It speak to the viewer. It is the incarnate past, a "somatic museum”: it nestles and binds all over within the identity of the person who has it.
In Homerus’ Odyssey, when Ulysses is recognised through the palpation of a scar, a long explanation is provided. And we also want to know what that epithelial sign did. Sometimes exhibited as a sign of strength, sometimes hidden, sometimes a sign of belonging, a scar always has a message to tell which is not just communicated with pain: it also speaks of pain. It links with the very essence of human beings: the pain of the body or the pain of the mind. By saying, ”I have scars" one gives the idea of suffering, of the painful memory of trauma; thus their figurative meaning has gone beyond any denotative definition. The metaphor takes over. Extremely human characteristics pile up around the scar: pain, identity, time, memory, body, metaphorical language, “aliquid stat pro aliquo.” But the scar is not always a solo experience, an individual mark. Even relationships are born throughout scars. They are often those relationships we care about. Bonds are created by those who share the same scars. And the physical pain, the traumatic event does not only concern just one individual: suffering spreads to those around them, the scar will reach them to the point they will have it too. Different people will find themselves with similar scars. And therefore those scars will turn into a relationship. Life itself begins with a scar: the clean-cut of the umbilical cord, of which navel holds the memory.
Claudio Leone
filming and editing Alessandro Vangi
editing Antonio Giovane
sound Pier Alfeo
thanks to Daniela, Claudio, Grace, Federica e Rong Place, Stefano.