Turner wrote about his painting Snow Storm: Steam Boat off Harbour's Mouth (1842):
“I got myself tied to the mast to observe the storm. I was tied four hours and did not expect to survive and I felt committed to record it, if I had survived."
The contemplation of a natural landscape unleashes our ability to imagine, literally the ability of generating images.
Since the ways of perceiving natural events are countless, our "imagined natures" are countless.
However all of these visions go beyond the real Nature which, in the process, becomes a sort of neutral background, almost devoid of colours and sound and set underneath our imagination.
Our desire of "imagining" Nature (being aware that this procedure is somehow deceiving), reveals our unconscious desire to move away from Nature itself, and look for partial or self-referential and more comforting visions.
3, 6, 9
Empirical observation of natural elements makes Ancona’s seafarers affirm that the waves raised by the east-wind (Levante) keep constant for three, six or nine consecutive days.
My work claims the veracity of that statement: the shootings were filmed during nine winter days belonging to the unfailing 3, 6, 9 days series.
The video editing is characterized by nine coloured, strongly blurred and superimposed video clips (a tribute to Turner's painting) upon nine black and white video frames (representing the natural background).
AT SEA IT'S ALWAYS WINTER
My friend Rudy, the former captain of the fishing vessel Liberiana, attributes this statement to a sailor of his crew.
While hearing his words, I was struck by their imaginative ability in evoking the sea strongly and precisely, yet replacing reality with its author's point of view come from his experience and perceptions only: the sea as difficulty and fatigue.
The images of tangled ropes and cables edited among windswept coastal landscapes, are emblematic of everybody life difficulties, and
all of us wish to freed from them by a clean cut, like that of a sailor's knife severing those tangled cables.
