liszt

Music: Franz Liszt. It is the beginning of the 20th century and three children are posing for a family photo. The children are young pioneers in a colony of Christian immigrants in Jerusalem. The subsequent intervention of the photographer has added to their bewildered faces the false colors of the photos of the period; a combination of chromatic shades with the odor of cookies and hot milk, porcelain dolls, long sea journeys, dusty old books, and an artificial “innocence”. This is the point of departure for a digital transformation in which the lower part of my face replaces that of the children, in a reversal of time and meaning crystalized in a non-time and non-meaning, as a different kind of story comes to light which, superimposing itself on the peculiar circumstances in which the photo was taken, looks for its metaphorical significance. In this way the three children become three human archetypes imprisoned in the eternal pillory of a family photo. It is a forced communion that translates into reciprocal impatience and an increasing verbal violence that superimposes itself on the words, preventing any kind of interaction. The sense of incommunicableness is obtained by juxtaposing fragments of phrases found on the internet, in a mash-up that unravels into a contemporary senseless dialogue that reveals how a word unlistened to is, consciously or not, violence in its pure state. And therefore the universe concealed in this photo, the epic of human dreams and illusions, in the family album of the search for a lost innocence by these ancient pioneers, is translated into a form of violence that throughout history has brought extreme consequences. When there is only the word, one’s own, the mouth becomes a weapon. Nonetheless, the invitation to listen is recuperated in the end, in a sort of message of hope that I consign to the world of these three unknowing ancestors.