In the happy coincidence of their respective 10 years of activity, the Dromos Festival and the MAN Museum meet for a first collaboration which was born with all the intentions of creating a partnership for the future and a natural osmosis between two fields, art and music , which have always looked at each other and contaminated each other. The vocation of the festival and the museum is by its nature inclusive and pervasive, it is therefore inevitable to cross the borders of our islands within the island, of the different reference territories to play on the echo and resonance, not only on the contents but also on the synergistic value of doing together, of withdrawing to make a place, to offer, in line with our best tradition, an invitation to share.
The theme of the 2009 edition of the festival, clandestineness, led us with its painful relevance to retrace some of its declinations through the language of video with works by Adrian Paci, Carlos Garaicoa, Armin Linke, Sejla Kameric, Hans Op De Beeck, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, Paolo Meoni. The video review The transgressed goal , combined with the concerts, explores clandestineness and contemporary transmigrations in their sociopolitical connotations and implications with points of great symbolic beauty and a sense of suspension and unresolved waiting.
Confronting the concept of clandestinity and the implications it is assuming, also as a result of the approval of recent laws, is necessary in a moment of social tension that tends to exclude rather than include other cultural worlds. But culture is the result of continuous contamination and the aim of the Dromos festival and this event is also to provide a glimpse, beyond the inevitable and sometimes dramatic problems, of the positive developments that true integration can bring.
The videos, carefully chosen by Cristiana Collu and her collaborators, were screened individually before each concert in Oristano, San Vero Milis, Nurachi, Baratili, San Pietro, Nureci. An invitation to reflect so as not to stop identifying with “other” realities and not to forget when we were the illegal immigrants… The videos were rebroadcast in San Vero Milis for the event San Vero… in short
In the video Turn on by Adrian Paci, about twenty men, all unemployed, find themselves sitting on the steps of a square every day hoping that someone who needs their workforce will pass by. Immersed in silence, the faces marked by the fatigue of these men parade one by one, who speak to us with just their gaze about their personal stories, their unexpressed energy. Until the silent synthesis of Center of temporary stay , a work of great tension and strong emotional impact, emblematic, shot on the runway of an airport where men, women, children of different ethnic groups, arranged in a long queue, wait to slowly advance towards the plane’s steps. The camera portrays their thoughtful, resigned faces, in the background the roar of the planes taking off. When he focuses on the first men who should access the plane, a change of shot allows us to see that beyond the ladder there is no plane, that there will be no departure or return, but only a useless wait.
I don’t want to see my neighbors anymore, by Carlos Garaicoa, transforms the simple construction of a wall that divides the artist’s garden from that of his neighbors, to the point of making it a metaphor for all the much more terrible border walls that separate, or have separated over time, historical situations conflicting.
The images, accompanied by Pierrot lunaire by Schoenberg, synthetically present the different phases of construction, rendering the action in rigorous black and white. The conclusion of the work, which in a certain sense embraces the predominantly ironic-satirical Schoenbergian atmosphere, shows a white plastered wall that has nothing bellicose about it, which however soon gives way to still images documenting certainly less innocent barriers. Sejla Kameric, on the other hand, takes us to a dreamlike zone with Dream House, shot of a house, a refuge, which seems to pass through time and weather while always remaining as a stable shelter, the only point of reference on the changing landscape in the background, almost like a dream for those who know the condition of involuntary exile.
Gaza City by Armin Linke uses archive material belonging to a local television station in Gaza to tell the story of the daily life laboriously led by entire Palestinian families. However, the scenes do not have the violence or even the spectacularity to which television news has accustomed us. The drama of the condition of many refugees expropriated from their territories can be seen rather in the hasty and tired gestures, in the resigned looks, in the silence that envelops an endless exodus. The narrative, extrapolated from its original context, takes on a meaning in the new configuration and different editing that goes beyond the content and questions the current artistic practice of post-production, a strategy that responds to the proliferation of images and information in current global culture: an annexation of forms hitherto ignored by the world of contemporary art.
In the very short term Border by Hans Op De Beeck, we see an x-ray image of a large moving truck, but a closer look reveals a small group of people hidden inside, we hear their breathing amplified and their whispered voices, people reduced to luminous silhouettes buried inside the cargo in the hope of elsewhere, conditioned by necessity and not by desire.
In Converging lines by Paolo Meoni against a background of buildings, in the middle, as if in limbo, a colorful group of Pakistani boys play cricket, while in the foreground, the parallel and continuous lines of the cycle path create an abstract space. The boys are filmed in their pauses and movements, in their playing tics in an infinite time that shortens and expands thanks to the flow and appearance of figures, shadows and apparitions of everyday life. The video once again places emphasis on the social territories that characterize every changing city and how communication is difficult in periods of transition.
Maria Jesus by Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio and a docu-fiction: the true story of a Peruvian woman (played by herself) in the hands of immigrant traffickers. We have always been interested, say the De Serios, in exploring the boundaries that exist between reality, memory and representation, starting from everyday, but often invisible, stories and dramas. Maria Jesus relives her drama, re-invents it in front of the camera and, by staging her memory, re-elaborates a personal and collective tragedy. The film is like a confession, intimate and silent, between her and us, and, therefore, between Maria Jesus and the public, halfway between the telling of a fact and its memory. Time of story and memory gradually coincide: Maria cries for what is happening to her (acting, in fiction) and at the same time for the memory of what really happened to her.
