Statement
I have certain habitual ways with working with film and video that have developed over the years. I tend to shoot long steady wide shots due to my work in creating live visual projections where I needed images that could be easily manipulated in real time. I’ve also had the tendency to avoid the use of computer-generated affects, so I look for these affects that occur naturally within the world: such as superimpositions and shifts of movement. Lastly, I tend to carry over emotions that are evoked during the locations I film to the editing process. These tendencies, their positive and negative affects, are used in Parabola.
Cutting between expansive high definition images and abstracted close-ups, Parabola follows the ascent and decent of the natural terrain and tourist infrastructures within three places in the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland. Within these places I felt a sense of emptiness as I moved through the controlled natural environments, a feeling of being within nature yet completely removed from it, as if there was no room for myself within the curated landscape. While on these excursions I filmed mountains of the region through long shots of a massive cultural center construction site, where cranes in the foreground moved against the landscape. I also captured footage traveling up mountains with Funiculars to tourist destinations. During the editing process I began juxtaposing all three areas. It was through a dissatisfaction and disappointment of my habitual ways of filming where I began to push the materiality of the image. In manipulating the high definition footage by blowing up and cropping the image in the computer, the time and space within each shot was extended, giving me the possibility to look closer, scanning and abstracting the physical material of the image.
It was during this process of discovery that I was able to use the natural affects between surface and form occurring in the world, like superimposition and reflection, to reveal a sense of displacement that occurs as natural and built environments meet. Whether it is the water from a reservoir shifting from obscurity to clarity; to the image of a man talking on a phone within a glass balcony that contains a superimposed image of a landscape with advertisements; or the pan of a steel bar containing shades of light. I wanted to be able to draw attention to the sense of visual displacement that is happening within materials if we look closely. These affects are then solidified through the push and pull of the distance and closeness of the original image and its blown up version.
Filmed in the following places in the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, July 2012
– Contra Dam, Verzasca Valley
– Lake Ritom, Piora Valley
– Lugano Art and Culture/LAC, construction site
– Mount San Salvatore, Paradiso
Exhibitions
– “Parabola” e “Nacelle” uno sguardo alle periferie del pensiero; due lavori sperimentali di Marco G. Ferrari, Nuovo Cinema Aquila, Rome, Italy, October 28, 2021. Part of XIª edizione di Logos—Festa della Parola.
– Stanza––ci sono cieli dappertutto, Narni (TR), Italy, April 22, 2017, group exhibit. Gallery screening with presentation by Prof. Brunella Antomarini (John Cabot University) of my past film/video projects including “Velodrome”, 2012; “D(z)iga”, 2012; “Parabola”, 2012; “Ferragosto”, 2013; and “Spirit Level”, 2017. In conjunction with the closing of the exhibit “La Casa e le Stagioni – Casa Ghirri” and the beginning of a new group exhibition project titled “Lessness”. http://www.stanza.cloud
– Lucciche: A Video Art Symposium, Ponte di Ferro, Carrara, Italy, June 22–25, 2016. Screened Resti, 2014, hd video and Parabola, 2013, hd video. Co-curated.
– The Athens International Film and Video Festival, Athens Center for Film and Video, College of Fine Arts at Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA, April 14, 2014. Screened Parabola, 2013, hd video.
– Sway: 2013 Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition (Ferrari, Somers & Harris-Trevor), Logan Center for the Arts Gallery & Screening Room, The University of Chicago, IL, USA, May 18–26, 2013, group exhibit. Exhibited Attraction, 2012; D(z)iga, 2012; Ferragosto, 2013; Skyway, 2012–13; and Parabola, 2013. https://marcogferrari.com/exhibition/sway-2013-mfa-thesis-exhibition-ferrari-somers-trevor/
