Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Valentina Furian

Ciacco

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 6:50 | Italie | 2021

When the day has declined, the night overwhelms us. An unusual bestiality envelops us, it does not belong to us but attracts us to itself. Ciacco develops from a reinterpretation of the sixth canto of the Inferno of the Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgilio enter the third circle. In the Tartarean circle gluttonous sinners are scourged by a violent rain and tormented by the gigantic and frightening dog Cerberus, feral triad. Ciacco is the gaze through which we are spectators and actors, as well as dogs: the eyes of a damned incessantly hit by a cyclical storm of images, instincts, rain. A damned who lies beneath the beastly torment inflicted by Cerberus, a gigantic, frightening three-headed dog. Three, the number is repeated: triple is the beast, triple the setting in which it navigates. As if we were in the amphitheatre of Dante’s hell, sitting on Ciacco’s lap, we observe the spectacle from the third tier of benches. On stage, the torture of the damned is revealed by the staging itself and by the epic character of the natural environment. The sequences in the film become the viewer’s exploration in “this long night of the world” that we are experiencing.

Valentina Furian (b. 1989, IT) is an Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy. She is working mainly with moving images. She studied Visual Arts at University Iuav of Venice. Her research investigates the relationship between human and nature. She is particularly interested in exploring animal domestication as a form of human domination as well as human domestication in relation to social rules. Her films have been exhibited in institutional and indipendent spaces such as: Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai, CN; VISIO - European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images; Collezione FARNESINA, Mattatoio, MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; MUSE - Science Museum of Trento; UNA galleria, Piacenza; Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Treviso; MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; The Blank Contemporary Art, Bergamo; Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa; Case chiuse, Careof and ViaFarini, Milan; Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa and Microclima, Venice, IT; Sunaparanta Center for Contemporary Art, Goa; Italian Cultural Institute in Mumbai, IND; Goyki3 Art Incubator, Sopot, PL.