“Alla Terra che mi porta non serve il mio sguardo. All’orizzonte va. Con le stesse radici, la speranza che lo muove e, immenso, il desiderio di incontrare il tuo.” (L. Palumbo)
Project statement
Spring 2020. A global pandemic shuts down social life. Stages empty, museums shut, cultural agendas empty. The photographer seeks refuge in photography. The poet in poetry. Tabula Rasa is an emotionally charged audiovisual diary entry, in which 2 artists reflect on the impact of the pandemic on social life, cultural life and our relationship with society and the environment.
Tabula Rasa is a documentation of an intense collective memory, treating the multitude of mixed emotions. It serves as a testimony of a time. But it also aims to reflect on that time and the actions of those that have lived it. What happens when life turns back to “normal”. What “normal” will that be? Where do we choose to be when we wake up?
The video is based on a series of photographs taken in Florence in April 2020. Being by then confronted as a musician with the consequences of the measures taken to prevent the spread of the virus, I went on the street with my camera to find images that could both document the times as represent the multitude of emotions that suddenly overwhelmed me. The torn up posters that started to appear all over town, visually representing a tattered cultural sector, caught my eye. The once so actively used means of promoting cultural events were left abandoned, like the related artists. Unnecessary.
But zooming in on these billboards showed the play of layers of content suddenly connecting out of their designed context, creating spontaneous compositions. Here and there the scarred and ragged metal plate, marked by years of extensive use, came uncovered, revealing its history and its beauty. Like turning to a ragged billboard for taking its picture, these images speak for the struggling artists trying to find a new creativity in a confined landscape, drawing energy from the released space.
The words carefully selected by Liliana Palumbo suggest similar conflicts. The sadness and loneliness on one hand but the hope on the other. Conflicting emotions crafted into poetry, that acts as a series of recognizable thoughts throughout the video, inviting the viewer to take part and wonder “Is it merely an outside narrator or are these my reflections?”.
The soundscape is based on field recordings made in the streets of Florence after the “first lockdown”. They are an alteration of the “hum” of civilization, a multitude of unnatural sounds created by the consequences of human activity. Ironically, this hum was almost absent when the billboards were transforming, when people were rediscovering the sounds of nature in the city and making resolutions to change their way of life when the lockdown would be over. The choice of pairing these sounds anachronistically with the images thus supports the concept of the images but also serves as a reminder of those resolutions.
