Can art be a way to suggest an alternative to the established system, through free expression and experiment? Can it be an effective tool of social change? Can it help the little fishes to organise and fight against the big fishes that make their lives impossible?
Art should express and communicate ideas and loses its vital energy when it enters the market circuits and becomes a product to sell.
Photography, video and performance should be means to stimulate reflections about the social meaning of the urban environment and our interactions with it or to deal with issues such as immigration, women identity, social control. Art, as a language opposed to the mass media, could reach a huge audience and be a successful answer to the need to create a system to spread information and possibly overcome any centralised control.
Art should be linked to its context and very close to the the social sphere. In the last period I have focused especially on immigration and surveillance as two sides of the same issue: in a world were only a minority has all the economical and political power, we are constantly controlled from a big brother above us and we are treated like little fishes with no value.
FishEyeTV
Last October, I went for the first time inside a Tropical Fish Shop…
Have you ever been in one? It is very beautiful… and quite sad at the same time…
After that time, I went back there many times and spent many hours filming the colorful fishes inside their tanks. Surrounded by the amplified noise of bubbles and water, I was feeling like in a muffled dimension where nothing bad could happen.
The fishes, kept in separate tanks appeared to me like a perfect metaphor for London, where people come from the most remote and beautiful countries, and sometimes mix just with their co-nationals, trying in some way to recreate the reality they were used to. And so they end up living in a sort of artificial world, where they are constantly surveilled from above.
As soon as I started to film outdoor, to render in a video my idea of London as global fish shop, I was run off by all the noise and the tension of a city in the post-terrorism era. I was arrested in a quite violent way just for filming and this started an ongoing process that is overwhelming me.
I had already been a victim of police violence in other cases and I did nothing. This time I have had the chance to tell it to the public and give a contribute to an important debate about how the authorities abuse their power.
This event has quite negatively affected my life: in facts I have faced lots of stress up to now and I’ll probably have to face many more till all the legal issues will be solved.
On the other hand, though, that unfortunate event has also had some positive effects: I stopped making videos that were purely visually beautiful exercises that could hardly convey the messages that I wanted to express and started to make lots of video reports quite engaged with the social. So in this last months I have been documenting different cases were the little fishes have stood up and challenged the authorities.
My main objective is to overcome the sense of extreme powerlessness that I feel since when I was arrested and use creativity as a tool to deal with this stressful situation.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
