Sleeping Beauty Conscience
2002
video - 17min
The story takes place in a sculpture installation created by Lydia Venieri. The music is improvised from children's toys and the voices generated with an Apple mac's synthesizer. It was filmed with a Canon ZR10 and edited with Apple's iMovie.
Yuri, a mad scientist, attempts to awaken the human conscience. He imagines a Sleeping Beauty Conscience imprisoned at the deepest level of Universal Sleep. He decides to force people into deep hibernation and then steal their dreams.
He cultivates mythological beings: Humans crossbred with everlasting plants. His dream compressor brings dreams from the immaterial world into our dimension.
In Yuri's Paradise the little boy and the little girl are captives. Esmet, his Caucasian assistant, wanders around and Maria Callas appears sometimes through the dream compressor.
Yuri is a contemporary anti-hero: His puritanical
ideas spring form the fear of degeneration. As in an ancient tragedy the heros address the public. Speaking their thoughts and developing the philosophy of their
acts.
While they awaiting The End, the King Monkey
appears announcing that Yuri has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Like in a modern commedia dell'Arte the End is postponed.
In an Epilogue Yuri develops his theory that fire is not an element.
Tomorrow
2009
video - 4min
Suburban deers, shooting stars, phosphor bombs, one thousand and one Gazan Nights.
The explosions you see within the video are not fireworks as the first might seem, but the deadly rain of phosphor bombs that are being used illegally on the population of Gaza and Iraq. I use the deers because they are symbolic of the suburban innocence, at the same time sacred like the soul of a burnt forest. I make them stare at the bombs as if they were looking at the star of Bethlehem trying to read the future and I have them singing "Tomorrow" which is an altruistic and nostalgic song of friendship.
I use the real voice of a young Israeli soldier. He's in the war defending his country. Like a thorn, like a flash of truth, his denunciation of the use of phosphor bombs is the last poem: The new Apocalypse.
In the background Gaza appears as if from the thousand and one nights. While the deers look on with their wide open eyes, beating hearts and standing ears are the image that we don't like to think about: Fear. They are exposed and unprotected, wondering, with their hearts frozen before they realized what has happened.
We are they.
Dolphin Conspiracy
2009
video - 18min
The explosions you see within the video are not fireworks as the first might seem, but the deadly rain of phosphor bombs that are being used illegally on the population of Gaza and Iraq. I use the deers because they are symbolic of the suburban innocence, at the same time sacred like the soul of a burnt forest. I make them stare at the bombs as if they were looking at the star of Bethlehem trying to read the future and I have them singing "Tomorrow" which is an altruistic and nostalgic song of friendship.
