Limbo
2006
Installation (wood, fabric) ambient dimensions,
video projection, (colour, sound, 7 min),
still lives (3 c-prints, 50 x 70 cm),
contours (drawings + album, 36 x 48 cm)
Installation view, solo show, Studio Guenzani, Milano, Italy
Limbo is the second act of The World of Interiors, a video trilogy named after a famous magazine, that focuses on the house as the incubator of human relations and desires. It includes three pieces: Ama, Limbo and Mindfield.
Marcella Vanzo again explores one of her most congenial issues: the nature of ties among people in the same group.
For this exhibition, Vanzo presents Limbo, the second part of the trilogy The World of Interiors.
It is a video installation composed of a soft, beige fabric structure, in the shape of a small house, the video is projected inside it.
Divided in two sequences, the video portrays the components of a family posing for a portrait first and then dining together. The participants eat colourless food, the colour of their costumes is light, to suggest some kind of consanguinity and they wear orthopaedic prosthetics that bind each other.
Yet the strain in their movements generates conspiratorial looks and laughter rather than tensions.
With respect to works inspired by different issues, in all video installations regarding the family, Vanzo seems to distil live reflections, sprung from her existential journey.
The amplified sound of the running blood (inside her veins) lies at the core of the sound component of this installation, it highlights the direct participation of the artist in what she is representing.
Furthermore, as it happened in Ama, first part of the trilogy, the actors are her close family, a circumstance that confirms her belonging to the same emotional environment.
Such strong involvement has an outcome at the level of formal research as well: shots are precise, devoid of superfluous details. Photography is elegant and the editing is functional to the idea that guides the work.
Inside Vanzo’s house, we are trapped in the same sweet web that ties us to our beloved. The desire to flee those slightly claustrophobic dynamics is as intense as our need not to leave them.
Antonella Crippa
