... you are safe! What has thrown such a shadow over you? -
The nigger...the nigger!
(Herman Melville)
This show is both the origin and the sequel of the videophotographic work Tears For Johannesburg presented by Letizia Renzini at Il Ponte Gallery of Florence.
The artist here continued a performance where, in silhouette and therefore as black shadows, dancers Marina Giovannini and Cristina Rizzo "inhabited" the evidence coming from her family's past: the photos of a great-aunt who had lived in Johannesburg in the Fifties and Sixties.
The whole work is a reflection on belonging and acceptance, on visibility and transparency; between the opaque and the translucent, a relationship between shadows, and between shadows and light.
The stage space is divided into two parts by a screen: behind it is the place without depth of the shadows, in front a "living" carpet, welcoming yet insidious, that will take on primary colours, a carpet for a choreography of trajectories and sounds.
Thus the time image and the movement image (which for Deleuze identify cinema reality) will co-exist, placed in fruitful relation by sound and movement.
Every relation with history is always an attempt at reconciliation; every relation with others is shadow-play with oneself.
Each attempt at reconciliation contains within it the profound likelihood of failure, relational inconsistency, resistance, and attachment to the suffering that generated the rupture.
And it is unable to see any reconciliation.
Letizia Renzini
Videoartist, musician, dee-jay and singer, she works with audios, videos, body and text, and has collaborated with important artists and research companies, from Virgilio Sieni Danza to Romeo Castellucci of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio.
She is the author of videos and performances whose research focuses on differences between the analogical and the digital and on the expressive and evocative potential of sound, voice and body in relation to contexts.
She is part of the TIMET musical research group with whom she curates productions and installations and creates electronic music. She also works as a journalist and music critic for newspapers and magazines, and she collaborates with Rai Radio 3.
Her experience and skill in the field of music often lead her to means of expression (conferences, performances, dee-jaying, articles) which mix the spheres of action with research of creative criticism and of critical creativity.
