LIBRO MUTO
There’s a story behind this video: the artist found some old history and geography books in Braille and some ships’ logs written on a daily basis by the office charged with fixing the position of the Vittoria, a freighter traveling in 1936 from Italy to India.
Years after this find, the artist used the pages of those books and notebooks to make a series of drawings and gouaches. As he puts it, “every sign made on that writing for the unsighted or on those astronomical calculations, besides violating the order of the discourse on those pages, was in turn decisively influence by it.” The book that contains them, conserving the original format and binding, is (the artist notes) “a sort of voyage in a voyage, with a stratification of languages, an accumulation of signs that generate unexpected contradictions and consonances.” Libro Muto, the video originating with this book, retraces the stages of this mental journey page after page, springing from the intersections of the various planes: the human plane suggested by a series of silhouettes of different yoga asanas that appear, printed over the pages of the book; the natural plane indicated by the silhouettes of plants, traced on the same pages, which in turn intercept the celestial plane through the excerpts from the notebooks of the ship’s log. A hypertext whose individual parts, secretly interrelated, point to a whole for which the book – significantly created for the blind – is a transparent metaphor.
Project Details
Length : 04', 25''
Date : 2015