I. textured II. land-s III. exp-s IV. falesia V. striated
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Preface
Beckett’s shorts (dis-assembled) pietro pecovela
2ndDiaries comes from a journey through the Dolomites, precisely along the Alta Via n.2, from Bressanone to Feltre. At first the concept was to shot a series of shorts and photographs inspired by Beckett’s “storie e racconti brevi - chapter: testi per nulla”, under the name “Beckett’s shorts”. The chapter is assembled in ten fragmented stories without a precise theme; the main movement of those texts are non-movements, gestures without a direction, there aren’t direct conversations, but wandering bodies and corpse that comes, stays and return on a chair or a bench, if they succeed in returning. Nomadic and floatings bodies flap andswing aimless through haptic landscapes and meanings. Scenes, sequences and structures of the texts recur in all the fragments. Basically nothing happens, there are few actual movements and gestures: actually there are just bodies and silent speechs. Moving fingers, arms, legs and feet ache, heads without bodies twist and spin, eyelids flutter. But outside, a generic scene and frame that has to contain the text, is precise and detailed: there are falesie, naked and cold landscape, caves, continuous and haptic places in which bodies, actors, objects and events move. And that’s all, an anarchic, savage and nomad nothingness that embrace spaces and ambients. The first idea was to bring the few and rare actual action of those texts out of their structure, contexts and languages: the derived language would be a real narrative for actors wearing just their underwear or shorts. A narrative of texture, rocks, labirinths, ice slopes, fog and forests, and everything wrapped in a omogeneus and dense absence of sound. What is left of the main concept and the structure of the project is a sort of reportage, a documentary, composed of five chapter. I realize that there wasn’t an effective sense in shoting a particoular scene or an action in which the actor was basically an absent non-sense. In order to affect the spectator, the re-assembled process was to turn the spectator into the actual actor. So from the absurd deconstruction of the relation body-scene - a body without a scene, or a scene without bodies- the projects place an actual relation between the spectator-actor-body and an image-scene.
This has been possible just becouse of the Beckett’s actor qualities in itself. It is an actor that affect and is affected by his body, and beyond this theoutside narrative frame and his singular concentration aren’t related. The scene is needed to localize heterotopic panoramas, so outer and other local and specific spaces. It is not accidental that texts’s frame are empty streets, winter landscaes, hills or path outside of the city, falesie, natural and desolated scenarios. And here is where 2ndDiaries works. The image is the scene ( probably it should be giant, even over scaled or too small, in an exposion or installation), a sort of set, in which the specator-actor concentrate, places and sets itself. This is similar to the relations between actors and networks in Beckett’s short: the body (standing in front of the image) is related with the scene, but they are autonomous in developing, distant. The sequence that in generated is a concentration of factors, thought, floating meanings and parts of bodies- and corpse. The scene is an actual and real narrative image, it is a fictional sequence, it has to proveoke and place; the corpse and the focus are the spectator’s body and his concentration. The project is composed of five chapter. Each chapter it’s connected with another. It is a flow of contaminations and repetitions, in the sense that a chapter has its own topic, but in the end they aren’t even so specific and defined. Image after image, chapter after chapter, it is generated a sort of sequence, a storyboard of possible scenes, events, situations. It is an investigation on the context and in a way it is the natural continuation of the beckett’s shorts. What is left after a scene, what is behind the scene? What does involve a scenario without a body? Waht includes a body? What is the relation between the scene, the actor concentration and the body? Is in there a relation at all? How is long a distance? and in between the distance? If it is useless the attempt to trace a line of sense, so here is what is left. Just a scene and the differences and repetitions of places, like in Textured. Closed, wide or claustrophobic view in Land-s. Actors, bodies and corpse moving, walking, climbing. Morpho-generative and topological places and planes . Falesie that emerge, concentrate and condense in singular point through escaping lines.
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2 n d : Diaries p i e t r o pecovela