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Volcano
is an exploration and meditation on uprootedness - bringing together volcanic
and technological eruption and extinctions. The volcano is Stromboli,
a mythic site of European uprootedness. It was also a departure point
for migration to Australia, including Giuseppe Russo, Maria's grandfather.
Stromboli was a place of inner vision for him as his outer world dimmed
and he lost his sight. Multiple monitors show the image, sometimes still,
sometimes frantic, positioned somewhere between landscape photographs,
mountain scenes and abstraact colour fields. There is a blurring of expectations
- are they scenes captured by the camera or are they internal visions
from Giuseppe's remembered past?
In late September
1999 we visited Stromboli, just off the coast of Italy. The first thing
that strikes you about Stromboli as you approach the island by boat is
its perfect cone shape – rising out of the sea. As the boat gets
closer, you can see the sparks and fire of its constant explosions.
Stromboli is one of those almost forgotten Mediterranean islands that
occasionally surface into the Western psyche. It is the island where Jules
Verne’s characters find themselves at the end of their search for
the Centre of the Earth. In 1946 Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman in
the film Stromboli. In this film a woman uprooted from a northern
culture comes to terms with life on the southern island. Stromboli is
also mentioned in the ancient myth of Thira:
The shape
of the island is strange, nearly circular – a mountain like
a ring in the sea. In the middle, a magnificent volcano. It seems
that Hephaestus, being displeased one day, had taken the island of
Thira in his hand and thrown it some distance, like a stone. It had
fallen in the sea not far from Italy giving birth to the volcanic
island of Stromboli. But in uprooting the center of the mountainous
island, Hephaestus had left its edges, with the volcano in the middle.
They say that if one were to put Stromboli back in its former place,
it would take up precisely that part of the island that was pulled
up. (E. Ionesco)
In Volcano we wanted to work with a Deleuzian becoming. How could the
work become volcano – a mountain, enormous and still, that moved
and erupted. We also wanted to explore interactivity away from our usual
work on the screen. In this case interactivity in a space, where the audience
itself is moved around the room. The animations, which attracted the participants
to close viewing, worked volcanically as still moving images.
The sound was ‘thrown like a stone.’ The room itself was their
eruptive ground.
In Volcano multiple monitors show the image, sometimes split
across two screens, and then repeated on several others. The monitors,
already relics of a bygone age repeat the image, although never quite
the same for any two monitors. Digital perfection this is not. The images,
still photos that move, flicker and slide, play with the literal gap between
the monitors, a reminder of the digital gap. The monitors are placed on
the ground, a reference to the ground of eruptions and a strategy to shift
the horizontal gaze.
The sound
jumps between multiple speakers, echoing the image's play across the gap
between the monitors. Localised rather than immersive, thrown like the
stones in the myth of Hephaestus, the sound also unsettles a stable listening/viewing
position. Both the images and sound were collected from the island volcano
of Stromboli.
'What!'
I shouted. 'Are we being taken up in an eruption? Our fate has flung
us here among burning lavas, molten rocks, boiling waters, and all
kinds of volcanic matter; we are going to be pitched out, expelled,
tossed up, vomited, spit out high into the air, along with fragments
of rock, showers of ashes and scoria, in the midst of a towering rush
of smoke and flames; and it is the best thing that could happen to
us!'
from - Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
Italian
translation
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Italian
translation |