The site-specific intervention designed for “Panorama”, the widespread exhibition curated by Vincenzo de Bellis on the Procida, island consists of a video installation visible through the keyhole of the old wooden door of a traditional house in Corricella, a famous and picturesque village on the island of Procida. 
With the explicit reference to Duchamp’s famous “Étant donnés”, the experience of the work announces itself to the visitor as a revelatory vision. The very act of looking at the peep-show, bending down to observe what is happening on the other side of the threshold, charges the event with expectations. To those who approach it and look, art promises a prize of truth. In this case, the truth revealed is none other than a fact well known to all, constantly in the news. Yet the images, which call for delicacy in the gaze that meets them, are at the same time painful and visionary, powerful, vital and desperate. The video, in fact, which presents material recorded by the artist himself, recounts one of the many illegal landings that take place on the coasts of southern Italy. The observer, with his back to the sea that bathes the shores of the island of Procida, on the other side of the door finds the same sea that is no longer idyllic, but a place of history and a theater of survival.

Project exhibited in:

Panorama, a project by Italics, curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, Procida island, 2021