Luca Staccioli

A twitch of cows’ ears — bodily, nervous, almost mechanical detail — emerges and merges with details of performers feet in a TV show and the demagnetized, flickering matter of a found VHS tape, on which glimpses of holiday rural landscape and a TV spectacle were recorded years ago. The damaged support, nearly unreadable in some parts, is digitized and processed by an artificial intelligence 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 details  — cows’ movements and of dancing feet  — and the tape’s glitch mirror each other, producing a tension between performativity and unconsciousness, subject and matter, decay, memory and regeneration.  The video, its time-line, the editing, the close-ups, defuse the idea of performance, memory and souvenir, the images thus become 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.