STRATI – luciferine dal buio vesuviano

Venezia-Torre del Greco, 2018-19

Digital video, 08:56

STRATI is a 9-minute experimental film, a visual fragment of my namesake Master Thesis in Architecture. The thesis questions the representation of contemporary territories through the urban agglomerate that has been built around Mount Vesuvius, volcanic land of the edge of destruction and yet intimately driven to survival. Through a non-linear visual composition, the film retraces the path of the 1631 lava flow –the last sub-Plinian eruption, whose pattern informs the current emergency model– from the crater down to Torre del Greco, my maternal hometown.

This personal geography is political, as its matters collide: the fireworks, festive social suspension of time and metaphor of inner territorial conflicts; the crater and the sea, boundaries of geologic suspensions of historical time during the eruptions. By overlapping these elements in a moving image –at times disturbing, at times deliberately unreadable– the work displays our ordinary condition of non-attentiveness and blindness to the human and more-than-human flows of intermingled life and destruction that shape our inhabited lands.

Structured in three main visual movements, STRATI is a memo that takes Vesuvius, as a paradigm of over-exploited anthropic landscapes, out of bi-dimensional visions. The film’s experimental approach discloses a sensitive and engaged attitude towards these territories, offering a stratified, emotional way to expose their hidden content – a necessary basis to feel them, think with them and therefore design with them. The personal narrative thus becomes a tool for political discourse, questioning established ways of seeing and representing territorial complexity.

The original soundtrack, integral to the film’s conceptual framework, was realized by Giulio Nocera, experimental music composer from Torre del Greco known for his work with tape manipulation and raw materials. The sound design was developed in close collaboration with the author, creating a sonic landscape that mirrors and enhances the visual stratification of the piece.