Luca Staccioli

Nervous twitches of cows’ ears bodily emerge and merge with the demagnetized, flickering matter of a found VHS tape, on which glimpses of rural landscape were recorded years ago. The damaged support, nearly unreadable in some parts, is digitized and processed by software. The tape, an organism altered by time, engages with the correction algorithm — a continuation of its analog alterations — generating errors and rhythms, breathing, mutating.

The image does not represent; it behaves. Within the loop, the video matter turns into an unstable surface. Its elements merge into a single body — all at once actors and co-authors of the image — forming a painterly unexpected choreography.

The cows’ movements and the tape’s glitch mirror each other, producing a tension between performativity and unconsciousness, subject and matter, decay, memory and regeneration.

The video defuses the idea of memory and souvenir, of domestication, and the ubiquitous, stereotyped and functional images.  The tape becomes a minimal ecosystem, capable of generating both a new landscape and a new organism. The work explores an ecology of the image — where every support, body, or sign, as a residue of function, reactivates itself and comes alive. 

The distorted sounds  — a loop of the original tape’s audio, some trumpet scales rehearsals, a pulsating remix created by the artist and a metronome — act as devices of translation, rhythm and disorientation. The sculptural display, a found modified plywood furniture, creates a body, both familiar and unfamiliar.

The work is thus part of a visual and conceptual research that investigates landscape and its representations as an active ideological and political value system, interrelated with economic efficiency, spectacle, entertainment and the domestication.