as part of the residency Storie di Luoghi, curated by 51Lire
“Purple is the color of dreams,” says Eleonora Da Col, artist of the duo, composed of her and Matteo Losurdo, who created the project La città come i sogni.
Purple dreams, in this case, tell of latent places, hidden in the unconscious, of unintentionally introjected spaces that unexpectedly manifest themselves in night dreams. The work is articulated on several, interconnected levels, combining audio recordings and photography, attempting to narrate the city through dreams, and creating a dreamlike map of the landscape.
After engaging the inhabitants of Mussolente, asking them to share a dream they have had, or would like to have had, set in the town, Da Col and Losurdo collected these stories anonymously and assembled them into a soundscape, accompanied by the voice of the handpan played by Isabel Rodriguez Ramos.
If the flter of the oneiric tells of a world that exists unconsciously only in people’s minds, the invitation is to experience inhabited space with greater awareness, realizing how many places are “stored,” involuntarily, in one’s interiority.
La città come i sogni is an investigation on the gaze and on the deep and mysterious links that connect landscape and people, on the border between dream and reality. Alongside the soundscape-an assemblage of narrated dreams-are the analog photographs, taken by Da Col and Losurdo during long exploratory walks. These are shots inspired by listening, telling their Mussolente of dreams and investigating places through an external, attentive and curious gaze.
The duo’s is a photographic search for dreamlike traces in the landscape, for metaphorical elements that refer to something else, and from which an alienating, magical and suspended visual representation arises.
The photographic component of the project, presented in vitrines, recalls the space of the church, a central place for the inhabitants. The photographs rendered in color, black and white, and negative flter the light from the Roccolo’s stained glass windows and blend with the surrounding landscape.
Although the two artists often worked separately on the project, shooting at diferent times during the residency, their photographic style, perhaps unconsciously, turns out to be very similar. Their photographs compose a single fow, as happens with images during a dream. Overall, the work is characterized by a fundamental feature: the geometry of and in the shots.
The geometric becomes the element of the oniric, in a world of motionless houses, apparently empty spaces, shadows stretching out creating another dimension, an almost total absence of people, and sometimes surreal vegetation. Lived experiences, memories, fantasies, reality and dreams merge seamlessly in the photographs and audio made by the artistic duo.
The last level of the project consists of a time capsule, at once real and virtual.
