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Immagine Tempo, A Short Film by Jacopo Benci.
The dense poetic texture of this video offers
alternating images contrasting Roman historical culture (classical and
renaissance stone work) with modern culture (the streets and the tunnel), and
these in turn with ferns and other green plants growing out (of the cracks) of
stones (mainly travertine a historically important material for Roman urban
culture of all periods). Nature
(the ferns) and Culture (the cultured stone of urban construction) are opposed.
Culture is divided into that with a historical (past) reference and the present
situation of the tunnel (the 'Traforo Umberto I')
under the Quirinale (a site of social
governance). A non-place of
transition (not yet a site of abject or 'underground' culture, although often
the site of culture's abjected, disposed, materials)
it is a site and sign of society's construction through waste, a space of
transit and pollution, lost to any other mode of being (unless present
illicitly, abjectly). Presence and absence are counterposed;
the presence of (a past) culture and the 'absent' presence of the present (the
tunnel mouth, the hollowing out that lies beneath the showpiece of the gardens
and the palazzo); the present of our culture and its contribution to life. In
the images that follow growing nature returns and redeems the travertine -
which it transforms as it takes it as its chosen context and frame. In this way
a cultural building block, this redeemed stone, is returned as it were to
nature. As a growing life-form, the plants' trajectory into the future poses
the question of the future. (The place of human beings in all this is that of
ghosts, superimposed faces, retreating backs). The direction of natural growth
is also the direction of the wind of time. Counterposition
to the entropy of a failed culture. Il temporale
The text (a reading taken from Serres',
The video ends on a triple-layered image
(which is then left to fade). Renaissance architecture: a frame-type structure:
and a face (possibly female); all coincide in a final image made out of
multiple superimposition. A question is posed (we must remember, this image
follows the future reference implied by the greenery). The architectural
fragment (the top half of a renaissance palazzo, its 'solar' or symbolic
portion, that part of a building indicating its general role in the life of the
community) asks of us, the viewers; in what kind of house do we live, in what
kind of city; and in what kind of dwelling place would we wish to live? The frame-like structure may suggest
either a prison for us (it enmeshes the face, the mirror of human consciousness
in the text) or conversely it may offer a structure we use, which will shelter
and sustain us. The direction of the stare coming from the eyes of the face
addresses the question to us...
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2003