ICONICANICONICANICONIC

video – performance -installation

original music Carlo Tuzza

2015 2video CROSS REVIEW OF VIDEO ARTIST

Undo.net, In/out selected by Giovanni Viceconte https://1995-2015.undo.net/it/duevideo/1433422755

“What we call the face is precisely this exceptional presentation of self by self. The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in

me, we here name face. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure.

It expresses itself.”. cit. EMMANUEL LÉVINAS

The topic “the other by itself” is inexhaustible theme and dear to many philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.

The questions I ask myself in this video work are as follows:

What is the relationship between us and the absolute?

The landing is inside or outside the us?

It is desirable interior solution?

The video that I created is based on the idea of “the other self” and the concept of dogma.

A hand turns the pages of a sketchpad with white pages . Start a comparison between the observer and the observed. A report of glances between the user of the video and the block that reveals every page rotation, new visual forms. Initially, we are faced with a number of Christian iconography that refer us to a vision of the certain, recognizable , reassuring. Leaf through the pages we discover other forms: a landscape, an animal , a arabic modular structure, a Japanese press, impossible figures , and so on until you reach a hundred iconography . At some point between the images that follow a few sheets appear completely white. In the viewer there is a change of vision. The knowledge of many visual forms and representations of the other leads to the idea suspend some of its real images. What first seemed defined and secure , it becomes increasingly less certain. The video closes with the parade of several white sheets and a white fade, as in a epoché the viewer reaches a dogmatic state.

In comparison with the face of the other, intended as the residence of the identity, we tend to lose the sense of difference and we feel responsible for what we see as a mimesis, empathy. In fact, the other remains unknown to us, not unknowable manipulability, and it is precisely the difference to give us the key, the instrument of greater knowledge: respect for the mystery. The landing to reach me is through the experience of the consciousness of the impossibility of defining a hard-edged.