expanses

w/ Eleonora Laura Pasqualetto

CGI animation,

00:09:18

loop

Made entirely in computer graphics, the film presents high fidelity 3D scans of the group of statues located in the Giardini Napoleonici in Venice. These stone figures are examined by the gaze of a virtual camera, which follows them through different light and atmospheric conditions, simulating the day/night cycle and the shadows cast by the surrounding vegetation. Of the landscape in which the statues were originally set, only these indirect effects remain, and the emptied space around them is now filled by a monotone, disembodied voice, suspended between being emitted by the statues or by the gaze that films them. As the camera draws closer, the anthropomorphic forms become unrecognizable, expanded to the point where the rock concretions and layers of moss reveal themselves as landscapes made of ridges and valleys. As this transformation takes place, the internal succession of day and night accelerates, compressing entire days into a few seconds. The voice, instead, slows down, dilating words and meanings into an indistinct murmur that reverberates across the rocky landscapes.

The film's realistic aspiration is finally interrupted by a sequence of abstract images, in which the lasers of a Lidar scanner (the same one used to produce the 3D models of the statues) trace luminous geometries in a space now completely devoid of reference points. The voice, suddenly human again, now addresses the technological gaze that produced the film, and together with it the viewer, listing everything that escaped the camera's capture and that marks the limit of the filmic experience.