“Irresistible Nonsense Pathways”, critic text by Laura Poletto, 2009, eng

The public art intervention "Tracciati Esistentiali" / Existential Traces consists of a double video projection on the walls of two buildings overlooking Campo Santa Margherita.

"Tracciati Esistenziali" is based on the blurred shots of a continuous cyclical movement - the constant rotation of small dark shadows moving over a light background and crowding around an empty space. At intervalling, brief fractions of time, the images become clear and extremely quick – almost subliminal - referring to what lies behind these systems. They are ants relentlessly moving amongst themselves, forming a circle.

Blurring becomes the device through which to visually translate the indistinct moving about, the directional homogeneity of shared dynamics within which personal paths and distinct individualities interweave. A single centre of attraction becomes the fire toward which all of the paths of a multitude in transit tend. Introduced into a continuous flow, which is both enthralling and viscous, one risks remaining entrapped.

From this perspective, the circle appears to become the symbol of a mechanism of coercion, a chain, a device of submission to the imposition of defined existential modes, rhythms and models of consumption and development. All the while, the rotation continues around nothing, which constitutes both the core and the propulsive drive. This seems to indicate the impossibility of a time of stasis or the suspension of assertion.

The frenetic one-way movement of the small living beings of a not so distant microcosm, whose sense apparently seems to elude the observer, becomes the mirror of macrospic dynamics, of already traced guiding principles, within which the individual risks suffocation, getting lost or dispersion. Beyond one’s own real needs, in the impersonality and a-criticality of a process of pressing homogenization and uniformization, it seems always more difficult to establish a time and a space of distance - a dimension preserved for the assertion of alternative existential possibilities of diversity and dissent.

Releasing oneself implies breaking the flow, inverting and multiplying the directions and focal points.

Unlike, the ants whose entire life cycle is based on the dependence on a system, on a specific type of society defined by non-disruptable “hard-and-fast hereditary instincts”, man can influence his life through his own behaviour. Reflection and aware analysis can play an important role in this process. (A. Einstein, Why Socialism?, 1949).