Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Corin Sworn, Tony Romano

The Coat

Fiction expérimentale | 4k | couleur | 57:58 | Royaume-Uni | 2016

The Coat loosely adapts Aristophanes’ The Birds from the Athens of 414 BC to contemporary Calabria. Here the two people who leave their home looking for a better life are a young man and his daughter arriving from Albania in search of a swimming coach who fled the collapse of Communism in the 1990s. They search for the coach among Italy’s Arboresh community, descendants of an earlier Albanian exodus of the 1450s. Along the way the pair intercept two actors touring the rural south in an attempt to resuscitate the long dead street hero Punchinella. Here histories are invoked only to be folded in on themselves and diffused back through the Calabrian landscape. The characters, naive to the terrain that surrounds them rely predominantly on cartographies of their own desire while the birds fly overhead taunting their imprudence. Co written with, and employing professional and amateur actors, The Coat’s itinerant figures don’t so much drive narrative as walk it slowly along.

CORIN SWORN was born in London, England, and raised in Toronto. She studied psychology and integrated media before earning her master’s at the Glasgow School of Art. Sworn has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, the National Gallery of Canada, and the 2013 Venice and Sydney Biennials. Her film work has appeared at Rotterdam Film Festival and the Centre Pompidou. TONY ROMANO was born in Toronto and earned his B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. His film installations have been exhibited internationally, with solo and group shows at MoMA, Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Articule in Montreal, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, and MOCCA and The Power Plant in Toronto.