Marcella Vanzo Studio

Marcella Vanzo Studio

Mindfield

2007
video projection, (colour, sound, 12 min)
performance, c-prints, collages
Installation view, Teatro Coccia, Novara, Italy

Mindfield is the third 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.

Premiere at Novara’s magnificent Coccia Theater for Marcella Vanzo’s new work, a fascinating and twisted video projection that closes The World of Interiors trilogy. 
In Mindfield man is alone, lost in the labyrinths of his own mind. He cannot communicate, meet others, deviate from his own path. Eight characters, their faces concealed by a swollen macrocephalic, opaque and lymphatic excrescence, wander through the industrial spaces of a huge and disturbing construction site. Eight prominent characters of Milanese society (whose identities you will discover only in the credits), whose roles imposed are far from their usual movements, from their own reference grid. There are several, symbolical, grids between the pipes, scaffolding and edges of the stage set, as well as on the theatre surface where the double video projection runs slowly. 
The wooden backdrop, all planks crisscrossed together, makes the video vibrate with new angles, new bevels, intricate and parallel physical paths. 

Continuously alternating between interior and exterior dimensions, the path seems to accompany the performers through human guts and orifices, only to look out – just for a moment – into the open air, a glimpse immediately denied. Desires and thoughts, emotional impulses and ideals, drag them through the dark and unfathomable labyrinths of mind and body. 
Set design and costumes, as always extremely accurate, contribute aesthetically to the overall result, as does the delicate sound especially composed by sophisticated musician Gak Sato. 
At the end of the projection, two masks in box seats are tenuously illuminated: their heads wrapped in the same obtuse, enigmatic and light bandage. These living icons transpose the contamination between the solid architecture and the impalpable poetry that connects Mindfield’s set to our reality, fictional maybe, as spectators inside the theater. We are in the stalls, they in the boxes. More grids, stairs and corridors divide us. 

Sara Micol Viscardi