Respiro della terra

Respiro della Terra is a site-specific single channel 6 minute loop video with sound.

Conceived of and produced for the 5th edition of SITU Festival in Modica, IT. The artistic residency and site-specific festival concentrate on the development of artistic projects in Sicily, away from the ordinary circuits of contemporary art.

For the 5th edition, SITU’s focuses on the city finding its expression in the Baroque artistic movement, as recently described in the Critic Dispatch “Baroque as Being” - published in Flash Art International #346 SPRING 2024 SELF- CONTAMINATION - by the feminist writer Rose Higham-Stainton. Here, “Baroque is neither an art nor a style, but a being-in-the-world”, capable of redefining “a loss or lack of control as an opportunity for endless and necessary change”.

Respiro della Terra takes the terrain of Modica, as seen from above, and activates it to reveal complex and shifting imagery of the territory’s cultural, metaphysical, and geological identity. 

Delineations and reliefs that naturally appear or are created through the digital reconstruction of the landscape as a static satellite image emerge as the contours of the mind and human experience and reinforce the fleeting and unknowable time that any place is given. The present moment is a position between the known and its potential becoming. Presented in the ex-convento of the Chiesa del Carmine, with its monastic history and earthy architecture, the video reflects the ground in the heavens and the heavens in the earth. Over the video, voices intonate a passage by the poet Salvatore Quasimodo, whose early hermetic writing and concrete words evoked mental images that dissolved into profound feelings.