L'origine della trama di Davide Dormino, un film di embrio.net

MuGa multimedia art gallery presents
L'ORIGINE DELLA TRAMA di Davide Dormino
a film by embrio.net

Davide Dormino has crafted a "sculpture" to tell the story of the evolution of a creative process: the passage from artisan to artist.

This work weaves the plot of the origin and development of the creative act, as it emerges from a specific design carried to the point of destroying the initial image: an artisan's measured mental work exploding into an artist's passion-fired folly. The staging of a gesture and the invention of an ordered method generate an interweaving riven by a trauma: the synthesis of the moment when artistic inspiration intervenes and turns everything upside down.

Groups are invited into the single room of the intentionally cramped exhibition space at a pace cadenced by the work's musical backdrop, where an iron slab almost three metres tall blasts them with a flux of metallic threads. The cascade flows onto the floor and all the way out of the space.

The threads spill out of a design delineated by 530 punctures on the slab; we may perceive a shape, but such is the confusion of the crazed threads that it is nigh on impossible to make out. Moving round to the far side of the slab the image becomes clear, like on the reverse of a piece of embroidery: the weave of a weft picks out a rib cage, which serves as the key to perceiving the meaning of the whole piece.

What we have here is the celebration of the origin of an artist-craftsman's work: a representation of confusion begat by order, a degeneration of the rule dictated by the blueprint for a design to be reproduced; an outline for embroidering a weft onto a piece of fabric, into a contemporary work of art.

The symmetrical shape of a rib cage describes a perfect machine vital to living -- much like work itself -- as it protects the heart and lungs and serves as the locus for breathing. Breath lets us know that we are alive in the very moment that we come into this world; initially rational and essential, it carries oxygen to the blood, and then immediately rebels against the organ that has generated it, erasing itself from our gaze. Off it flees, streaking away via interwoven metallic threads which seem to cough and suffocate as they seek a new way of living, as they uncoil into a huge and uncontrollable skein. There is a desire to freeze an impossible instant: the exact moment when creativity intervenes to transform the craftsman into an artist, when a "useful" article becomes "useless" and transmogrifies from rational to irrational.

The rib cage references people who have always used fashion as a pretext for expressing their own artistic inclinations, from Elsa Schiaparelli assisted by Leonor Fini and Salvador Dalì to Rei Kawakubo and Alexander McQueen. The artist has been able to synthesize fashion through embroidery thanks in part to the work of Liliana Tudini, who acted as an embroidery consultant during development of the project.

Music -- a sound effect that amplifies the image of the rib cage as a speaker and calls our other senses into the equation -- heightens the theatricality of the rite we are asked to experience. The soundtrack was composed by Diego Buongiorno, working from the true music of the origin of the universe recorded by scientist John G. Cramer, Professor of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle.




[1] Translator's note: the Italian title of the work, L'Origine della Trama, combines the meaning of "weave" and "plot" (as in story) through the single term "trama".

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Davide Dormino
• MuGa multimedia gallery
• Embrio.net
• Diego Buongiorno
• Altaroma
• A.I. Artisanal Intelligence
• Rufa
• Clara Tosi Pamphili
• Liliana Tudini
• John G. Cramer
• Rib Cage
• RUFA
• università Design unirufa Roma