Contemplation is a revolutionary act, not a bourgeois luxury. This is what g. olmo stuppia suggests through his work, Sposare la notte – literally meaning “marrying the night.”
Night – and its prelude, dusk – are key elements of g. olmo stuppia’s film. Dusk refers not only to the moment of the day in which the four episodes of the film starts, but also to the decline of the West, whose name refers to the cardinal point where the sun goes down. In fact, Sposare la notte narrates of the failure of certain ideals of progress by exploring the traces and the debris that the attempt to modernization often left behind.
Sposare la notte was shot in four different moments of 2022, during four eco-walks organized by the artist in Venice and in Palermo. These explorations were aimed at listening to the sound of the places and to the voices of their – human and non-human – inhabitants. At the beginning of each walk, participants were required to leave their phone, in order to facilitate the immersion in a process of re-connection. Their fingerprints were also taken and their mark was left on a white sheet, a material sign of the body. The four eco-walks started in the late afternoon and ended around midnight, a mentally and physically intense exploration of some specifically chosen places.
The first eco-walk took place in May 2022. It started in Cannaregio, in Venice, and it arrived, by boat, in the island of Murano and in Sacca San Mattia, a polluted area that shows the failure of modernization. The place is full of glass scraps that the participants were invited to collect, so the artist could catalogue them. The second eco-walk happened in June 2022 in Palermo, in Sicily. It started from Fincantieri, in order to explore an industrial area and the consequences of pollution on the health of people living there. In September 2022, the third eco-walk aimed to explore Brancaccio, a people’s neighborhood in Palermo. The fourth eco-walk, in October 2022, went back to the exploration of the Venetian lagoon, with a visit by boat to the Mose, an enormous system of mobile gates situated in the lagoon and designed to protect the city of Venice from flooding.
The places chosen for the eco-walks are peripherical and island territories, forgotten and not really known by anyone, not even by their inhabitants. The idea is to relaunch these territories with a positive look toward the future of Italy – an Europe – by starting from peripheries.
Sposare la notte creates the possibility of a new way of living places, by simple but effective gestures of care. Sposare la notte talks about ecology by doing ecology. The film is a kind but strong invitation to rethink places and our role in them. By recovering the ability to listen to the silence and to follow fireflies.
Already part of the Public Program of La Biennale di Venezia 2022, the film was premiered in its extended and cinematographic version on 8th November 2023 in Cinema Giorgione in Venice.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.