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Notturna

In Volterra, the fifteenth-century cloister of then Pinacoteca serves as a closed domain, perfectly self-contained in its classical proportions.[read]Across this space passes the body of a dancer (Gastavo Frigerio once more) exploring the space, conforming and reacting to a series of luminous marks and drawings laid down by the artist. As in the Villa Ponti event, the architectural features of the setting are emphasised and then anihilated through the imposition of illusory perspectives. The sound accompaniment delineates a second domain lying below the visible setting – an unseen subterranean realm exerting an influence on the dancer which he is unable to resist. The centre of the cloister coartyard, flooded with water, serves as a reflecting mirror which multiplies the luminous traces, distorting and disarticulating the flow of events: the dancer’s body interacting with the reflecting surface to the point of merging with its reflected image. Thus the mobile language of the body, an element of change and mutability, combines with the static structure of the setting, subverting and transforming it. The body preserves its being through a process of change and, in moving, opens up a void in front of itself, the void of its own profile, strewing the signs of its passing and recognition. What is offered is an image of time marked out by the body, as opposed to the absolute immobile time of the fixed drawings, the statis of rule-bound structure. The seemingly absolute authority of the current state of affairs is revealed as contingent, by no means eternal, established historically and therefore somethings witch may be dis-established.[/read]

Notturna. Environmental and sound installation-performance, Volterra, Pinacoteca, 1983 [PE0014]