the european biennial of contemporary art
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artists

Rä di Martino

1975, Rome, IT Lives in New York, US

The Dancing Kid, 2005 Double channel video installation, 13’, loop

ROVERETO

Dancing_kid_manifesta_opt

In her video works, Rä di Martino narrates the archetypal situations of human relations in the formative processes of identity construction. The artist explores both mundane and spiritual states, collecting patterns of behavior shaped by local and global economies of collective consciousness and post-medial condition. Thus the artist is engaged in constructing a sort of subjective vernacular, at the same time resisting the seductiveness of the available archive of human existential vocabulary. Di Martino’s The Dancing Kid is a carefully choreographed, uncanny mise en scène of split identity. Immersed in the sublime landscape of a desert, an actor is rehearsing his life as an imaginary theater of his self. The actor is caught between reality and fiction, past and present. At times the actor bursts into scenes re-enacted from the Nicolas Ray western, Johnny Guitar (1956), lost in the middle of nowhere, recalling absurd personages of Ionesco, suspended in an illusory state of not-yet and nonsense. His solitary existence finds a companion in the mute presence of the Dancing Kid, a secondary character in Ray’s film, represented in Di Martino’s video by a hanging jacket. Processing memory, between amnesia and an appropriation of a parallel universe of fiction, Rä di Martino stages the impossible by confronting personal and collective history.


Location

ROVERETO

ADAM BUDAK: "PRINCIPLE HOPE"

EX PETERLINI, VIA SAVIOLI 20 – MANIFATTURA TABACCHI, P.ZZA MANIFATTURA 1 -STAZIONE FERROVIARIA, PIAZZALE ORSI, I-38068 ROVERETO, ITALY

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