Frames
By Daniela Cascella
1. Click, Slide
Between 1938 and 1940 a teenager student attends a series of art history lectures at Bologna University in Italy, in a dark small classroom with tall desks and a screen behind the teacher’s table: a classroom like a desert island, in the heart of a night with no more light. The lecturer bears the unreal aspect of an apparition. ‘He was, in fact, an apparition.’ On the screen: slides of early Renaissance paintings by Masolino and Masaccio, faces and limbs caught in expressions and angles that draw and embody a partial architectural space, and appear as hinges between people and history, people caught unguarded on a screen by means of formal arrangements of gestures.
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It’s a convergence of sense, split across frames and punctuated by clicks.
It’s a trying to think through fractured forms and jolts of history, click, slide, click, slide.
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Try to think transience, to linger on the impalpable quality of the light projections, the barely audible yet punctual clicks of the slide carousel, interferences of apparitions, rhythms and gestures.