In conjunction with the 54th Venice Biennale, the Museum of Ca’ Pesaro presents a site-specific project by Anita Sieff at the first floor, Sala 10.
Love as principle of integration is the ever pervasive element of Anita Sieff’s experimental video works. The artist defines love as the invisible core aspect of life. This audio video installation makes use of the myth of Eros & Psyche as a vehicle to explore an invisible dimension to be discovered by developing an alternative attention span. The artist brings into play Duality. On one side the apparent supremacy of our visual experience emphasizing feeling instead of an invisible parameter. On the other side the importance of synchronicity by affirming that the same evidence is present in both the psychic and the physic dimension. Reality is cybernetic and eight folded, it comprises body and mind, time space and cyberspace. This work is an investigation into the nature of perception and it is to be found in that undefined space which escapes from the rational mind. Sieff shows the subtle difference between the visible and the invisible, a distinction that is often blurred by our own incapability to pay attention to the detail of things which hints to the essence, thus trusting what is disclosed as the larger meaning. The installation is inspired by Psyche’s journey into the underworld which reveals a passage into the unconscious. It is here that the self, Psyche, discovers her own “essence” and therefore her truth will to be projected into the world. Eros is the principle element of this germination”.
Regaining the power to define oneself and the courage to choose, even if this means undertaking the journey into the underworld, the unconscious, becomes the way to reconnect with one’s own origin and freeing oneself. Anita Sieff’s research brings to the surface the need we have to meet our own destiny as implied destination. Psyche, in her wedding dress, is brought on the hills by her mourning family and left alone. She will disappear from their sight by walking courageously towards the unknown. Only this very unusual and personal experience will allow her to meet Eros and be reunited with her divine nature with the sacred marriage.
The scene of underworld has been filmed at Cà Pesaro Museum utilizing “the Poem of human Life” by Giulio Aristide Sartorio, an artwork made for the occasion of the Biennale of 1907, as a backdrop.
Special effects are made by EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani Milano. www.effettidigitali.it as sponsor.
The catalogue, in English and Italian, is published by Il Canneto Editore, with texts by Giulio Alessandri, Pierluigi Basso, Giuliana Conforto, Marco Ferraris and Silvio Fuso.