Film-Installation. IIC Paris

The Extended Briefing Film – Installation for a Poetic Performance « Pass the Word » At the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris.

In collaboration with Michaël Batalla, Mariangela Guatteri, Nathalie Quintane, Gilles Weinzaepflen, Michele Zaffarano

This event is organized as part of « Paris in All Letters, » in collaboration with the House of Poetry. Italian and French poetry do not merely occasionally cross paths; over the past thirty years, they have engaged in an uninterrupted dialogue. This dialogue, often discreet and dispersed across various initiatives (translations, meetings, publications), undeniably exists. It facilitates the exchange of perspectives between countries and the passage of texts and words from one language to another. This evening presented at the Italian Cultural Institute is both a testament to this dialogue and a unique opportunity to put it into practice. Three Italian authors have invited three French authors to create a one-hour performance, realized through a continuous montage of their various poetic voices and actions. Each of the six poets contributes in their own way to the expansion of the poetic field, drawing from their experiences in publishing, cultural activities, engagement with visual arts and photography, musical and documentary cinema, translation work, and experimentation with narrative genres.

What happens when the message is lacking, when it simultaneously delays its transmission and reception? What strange temporality takes hold in this blind and deaf moment of communication? What possibilities does it open up? The Extended Briefing offers a three-part exploration of this circumstance: 1) an awareness of a communication deficiency, a paralysis of communication – and, of course, the inability to narrate and describe through words, sounds, and images; 2) the emergence of the figure of insomnia, i.e., the circumstance of a permanent communicative disposition, at every hour of the day, for 24 hours, beyond the motivations and pragmatic needs of communication; 3) the intrusion of the third witness, namely the non-anthropomorphic perspective embodied by natural agents, animals, and plants. The Extended Briefing evokes, through audiovisual communication tapes, a phantom operational meeting devoid of content, data, figures, commercial objectives, or propaganda. Foreign contents of insomnia and minuscule living beings (herbs, insects) will be inserted into this mental availability for open and omnilateral communication. The Extended Briefing can also be considered a search, within and beyond our linguistic and visual codes, for elements of otherness. An otherness that does not arise from a phantom elsewhere of communication but emerges from the reuse of the remnants of these very codes.

The encounter between the artist Sergio Trapani and the writer Andrea Inglese unfolds under the sign of a weakening that each of them acknowledges regarding their own means of expression. This weakening implies not so much simplification as it does a thinning out.

Sergio Trapani has been working for years at the intersection of design, cinema, and video art, with a particular passion for visual imagery conceived as residue, remnants, material on the verge of annihilation. His images, drawn from the vast documentary archives of everyday life, rarely draw from sequences taken from the realms of cinematic or television fiction. They acquire a sort of extreme semantic subtlety, transforming into almost pure movements of shadows, outlines, and color spots. In short, they become elementary materials of visibility, rather than fragments of articulated visions.

Andrea Inglese’s writing offers a « lost voice, » a feeble, almost childlike discourse that intertwines with these potential visions’ materials. This voice seeks both a narrative and a sonic-visual context in which to fit, to occupy space, to function as accompaniment or contrast.

The relationship between the visible and the sayable envisioned by Trapani and Inglese doesn’t opt for systematic dissociation or descriptive-narrative articulation. It doesn’t do so primarily because the word first and foremost attests to this uncertainty, vocal material alongside visual material, embedded within it but never entirely merged with it.