2005
togetherforever consists of a music box, a series of photographs and a video-installation. These elements are intended as fragments of a single project, rather than separate pieces. Born from a reinterpretation of the myth of Salome and John the Baptist, central figures of the artistic representation since the Middle Ages, the project brings together today’s political and cultural situation with the theme of conflict in love relationships.
Through the use of voice, editing and breakdown of images, words and sounds, the video installation, composed of three synchronised projections, creates a dreamlike and emotional atmosphere scanned by the unraveling of the dialogue.
The central projection depicts a surreal dialogue between Salome and the head of John the Baptist. The image, inspired by paintings by Titian and Caravaggio, is a pictorial set in which the two characters, almost motionless, talk about their relationship and the decadence of the world. At times the two characters disappear from the central projection to reappear in the side screens in two contemporary urban contexts. Salome in an almost empty amusement park and John in a closing market, places chosen to symbolically represent the crisis of consumer society. From these nocturnal situations, linked by a kind of underlying melancholy and by the artificial lights that illuminate them, the two characters continue their dialogue speaking to each other from one screen to the other.
The project also includes a series of photographs that add multiple interpretations to the work: an image of Ottonella (Salome) dancing while brandishing a knife and one of Nicola (John) who, apparently suspended in the air in a nocturnal cityscape, looks at the world upside down. Other images depicting fragments of the dialogue composed by typefaces and photographed on the work surface (readable thus backwards) completes the series of photographs.
Finally a wooden music box made of a cubic box inside which, facing a mirror, Salome, is holding John the Baptist’s head, while symbolically dancing to the tune of “What a wonderful world”, one of the songs that had been prohibited for public transmission in the United States after September 11.
