Alephs (still) – Single-channel / Video-Essay installation – 10’ 32’’ (2020)
Alephs – Single-channel / Video-Essay installation – 10’ 32’’ (2020)
“The Aleph? Yes, the only place on earth where all places are, seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept discovery to myself and went back every chance I got…Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it too. I saw my empty bedroom, I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between to mirrors that multiplied endlessly;…I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon, the unimaginable universe.” From Jorge Louis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories.
Clashing between the fictional and epistemological meaning behind the string Aleph concept, the video essay composition was elaborated during the first wave of the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic that fell upon us at the beginning of 2020. Born as a sort of experimental visual diary, this articulation of thoughts re-imagines acts of care throughout the filter of the cinematic lent, in an attempt to re-inhabit the immediacies of imaginable and un-reachable surroundings. This word-placing / space-making / place-caring journey articulates itself around constructing a real and utopian “bridge,” allowing a reflective understanding of liminal environments between their physical, metaphorical, literal and scientific possible encounters.
An Aleph in mathematics indicates a set of numbers used to represent infinite sets’ cardinality (or size). Infinite sets can have different cardinalities. The Aleph expresses the extreme limit of the number line, applied to a function of sequence that diverges to infinity or increases without bound. Now, imagine an uncultivated but living space of vegetation, an abandoned area of approximately fifty square meters between one street and another, an in-between liminal urban environment you might have found yourself interacting with. Suppose for a second that this space exists, but nobody talks about it because nobody sees it, can get there, or knows it. A small oasis/waste piece of land hidden between one building and another without any access or consideration. Imagine that you can’t see it from your window by chance, but it still exists. An area past attempted to, but ultimately, forgotten. Now, imagine building an imaginative bridge that allows you to get there. It is a bit like waiting time, a time intensely real that carries no particular interpersonal declination. As Borges suggests, an aleph is also a place from which all places can be seen and are; the unimaginable universe. This particular time discovered this space, an area that, like waiting in time, exists and does not exist, a length of negotiation to explore, and above all, care, re-appropriate and inhabit.
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Alephs (stills sequence) – Single-channel / Video-Essay installation – 10’ 32’’ (2020)
ALEPHS (Installed view) – WANDERLUST BIENNAL 2021, MoCA Skopje – Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje(MKD)
Alephs – Framed satellite screenshots detail 01 – Inkjet print on cotton paper 300gr, 130×60 cm (2020)
Alephs (Satellite screenshots details 02/03) – Satellite Google street-view captures, Via Montaldo, Genoa (IT) (2020)