Flatform

In the course of a long, slow take over Funafuti, both drought and floods appear in a constant uninterrupted rhythm. The state of flux between both type of events is reflected in the places and actions of the inhabitants making the island’s extremes seem familiar: the air is riven with waiting and suspension. The island of Funafuti, in the archipelago of Tuvalu, for some years now has become the stage for a unique phenomenon. Due to the unnatural warming of the sea, saltwater seeps into the subsoil bubbling up through the porous terrain provoking floods which put the future of life on this island at risk.

In the course of a long, slow take over Funafuti, both drought and floods appear in a constant uninterrupted rhythm. The state of flux between both type of events is reflected in the places and actions of the inhabitants making the island’s extremes seem familiar: the air is riven with waiting and suspension. The island of Funafuti, in the archipelago of Tuvalu, for some years now has become the stage for a unique phenomenon. Due to the unnatural warming of the sea, saltwater seeps into the subsoil bubbling up through the porous terrain provoking floods which put the future of life on this island at risk.

In the course of a long, slow take over Funafuti, both drought and floods appear in a constant uninterrupted rhythm. The state of flux between both type of events is reflected in the places and actions of the inhabitants making the island’s extremes seem familiar: the air is riven with waiting and suspension. The island of Funafuti, in the archipelago of Tuvalu, for some years now has become the stage for a unique phenomenon. Due to the unnatural warming of the sea, saltwater seeps into the subsoil bubbling up through the porous terrain provoking floods which put the future of life on this island at risk.

In the course of a long, slow take over Funafuti, both drought and floods appear in a constant uninterrupted rhythm. The state of flux between both type of events is reflected in the places and actions of the inhabitants making the island’s extremes seem familiar: the air is riven with waiting and suspension. The island of Funafuti, in the archipelago of Tuvalu, for some years now has become the stage for a unique phenomenon. Due to the unnatural warming of the sea, saltwater seeps into the subsoil bubbling up through the porous terrain provoking floods which put the future of life on this island at risk.

A passing car and opening windows are noticeable occurrences that attest to the vitality of the film's images, illuminated by reflectors from the front.

It is sunset in a mountain landscape. An orchestra and a choir, along with a large group of adolescents who act as "living-music-stands", are filmed as they play the first part of Mahler’s 8th Symphony. The musicians gradually begin to move in a precise choreography, led by their living-music-stands. As these movements are executed, disparate groups of musicians, singers, and living-music-stands begin to disappear along with the sounds that they emit. The music progressively becomes a sound object captured in the course of its own erosion, which corresponds to the slow dissolution of the landscape’s visibility due to the setting sun. Ultimately, the music as a sound object and the landscape as a visual object become identical, all while being completely transformed in regard to the starting configuration. Thus, in TRENTO SYMPHONIA, the landscape becomes a point of convergence between contemplation, correspondence, and imagination.

The elements of this video are the ruins of a house for attracting birds, the first movement of the Quartet in F major by Maurice Ravel and then rain, wind, snow and fog. A long take presents, in a far-fetched sequence, the four meteorological elements which befall the different portions of the ruins. The four musical instruments, performing the quartet, cease to be an ensemble and become, individually, the audio tracks corresponding to each of weather. So the sound of the first violin drips as the rain, that one of the second violin is snow-muffled, the sound of the viola moves like the wind and that one of the cello reverberates like inside the fog.

An anthology of short films by the cooperative Flatform.

A PLACE TO COME is a video about the mutual references between the plain description of a place and its concrete demonstration.

A series of sequences of landscape shot along a distance of 60 kilometres forms a mosaic of places and points of reference undergoing continuous transformation and which do not exist in our own surroundings. In this video, the bodies are not near or far: they are large or small. The horizons change and no space is independent of the person observing it. Incorporating only memory, the landscape is seen in a variety of speeds and movements applying a corporeal logic to the vision.

Twelve people move about four marked paths on the condition that their movements and trajectories resemble one another as much as possible; movement becomes autonomous, time is transformed, all in one shot.

Sunday, 6th April 11:42 a.m. is a video about landscape understood as a complex network of connections that guide relationships between people. It is a video that focuses on the relationships between actions and places, movements and the environment, because it points out that people are the place in which they live as well as the trajectories which the place itself creates. The video underlines the reciprocal connection between environment and its inhabitants, where territory plays an inevitable role also in its anthropomorphic transformations.

A sequence of likely urban architecture is represented from a long running-shot, doubled in a mirror effect. In this video, only the floating architectures are visible: that creates a landscape which seems real and impossible, at the same time.

A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of barycentre. The nature of the lacks of balance is invisible and his ability into standing up in spite of unnatural postures is inexplicable: the videowork has been realized without special effects but is simply the result of a real shooting of an artificial condition.