Gloria Chiappani
Rodichevski’s Uomossessione: escaping from the Gaze and further
beyond
A multimedia work that unites music,
images, dance and poetry
Review. 1
Interview. 2
Photo
gallery and video. 2
Yuki Imaizumi
in Uomossessione.
©
Photo by
GloriaChiappani Rodichevski
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When
Nietzsche announced the death of God, Man believed he was free, from the burden
of morals, and the weight crushing him and binding him to the metaphysical
gaze. In reality, however, things turned out to be completely different; God may
have died – but that Gaze survived and multiplied itself, in a hypertrophic
manner.
The history
of man from the 18th Century onwards, is the story – to cite Gloria Chiappani Rodichevski’s
multimedia work – of the Observed who battles to open a passage through which
he could elude the constant surveillance of the Gaze. Existence is considered
as a metaphorical and non-metaphorical prison: we cannot but recall Jeremy
Bentham’s Panopticon,
pearl of English utilitarianism right at the height of the Age of Enlightenment.
It was an “ideal” scheme of a perfectly circular prison in which the
hypothetical guardian – positioned in the center – could monitor the life of the prisoners in a capillary and constant manner. To
re-read the Panopticon as a twentieth-century metaphor (as Michel
Foucault did) would mean finding yourself face to face with the Leviathan of
modern times: the nightmare of a panoptic society and an invisible power, no
longer transcendent like the monarchies of the Ancient Regime, but immanent in
the society it controls.
The
reference to the science fiction of the twentieth century, from 1984 by George Orwell to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, is
immediate. And yet when we watch the first part of Uomossessione, the ballerina’s
groping movements under the petrifying empire of the Gaze seem distant from
possible political interpretations. Why? And for what contemporaneous motive
does the projected eye continue to frighten us, and define itself as a symbol
that may not be immediately deciphered but emotively recognizable? We have to
look for the answer in a generational reject: in the end of the Cold War, the
end of great utopian politics, the end of politics itself, intended as an element
of group participation and involvement. The Gaze has survived once more, and in
this case breaking up in a kaleidoscope of possible keys to the reading: it is
the analytical gaze of science (of “scientism […] obsessing [man] to death”), it
is the invisible hand of the media empire or it is something that goes beyond
sociological aetiology, as in Michael Powell’s Eyes that Kill, a Hitchcock-type of psychological
thriller, wherein the assassin with the camera’s eye, constantly films his
victims at the moment of death.
There are
numerous interpretation modes and each can choose his own: in the first part of
the video, Yuki Imaizumi’s dance (The Observed) refers to all and in a
sense excludes them all, since it is not set up as a manifest, but as a pure
symbol, a multiform corolla of archetypal evocations. Uomossessione is a fable of
purely introspective sounds and gestures. It is a poetic evocation that draws
from the mysterious background of collective subconsciousness
in which the level of comprehension pertains to the emotive sphere even before
the rational one. This holds not only for the first part of the video but especially
and above all for the conclusion, The
Sublimated: on the screen liberation from the Gaze is configured as the
liberation of the image in itself. The gestures of the ballerina ‑ frenetic
and choppy at first – are smoothed out in a harmonious rhythm of pas de bourrée. The
liberation – from the thousand faces, as in the imprisonment of the Gaze - goes
beyond the symbol, beyond the image: a serene transparence, gently interwoven
with sounds and lights that seem to evoke Nothingness, intended not as a
negation, but as the space of liberty and beauty, and a beginning.
Read the
interview with Gloria Chiappani Rodichevski
on: http://www.morfoedro.it/doc.php?n=1508&lang=it
See the
complete photo gallery and some shots of the multimedia video on: http://www.morfoedro.it/doc.php?n=1485&lang=it
Translation by
Yolanda Rillorta
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