Traits Féminins is a video dance project in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Annamaria Ajmone,
who performed in a sort of white cube, Ariella Vidach studio in Milan, Fabbrica del Vapore, thanks to project manager Giulia Basaglia.
I filmed Anna performing a choreography, in which abstract drawing is very present. We had no script. Anna was improvising, following a dramaturgy we had slightly traced before. She was drawing some intangible lines in the space surrounding her. At the beginning lines were more orthogonal, it seems a rather rational scheme. Lines became more and more nervous, interrupted, broken, as long as she tried to trace a geometry surrounding her, an impossible pure euclidean geometry. I drew a few animated frames, following the dramaturgy, i.e. her movements, re-inscribing them in basic geometries and gradually transforming them in a fluid mobile energy, where there is no distinctions between the outside and the inside, interpreting her research process of passing limitations, her lines disrupting into an explosion of points and lines, when geometric shapes fade away.
The main idea of the video was to create a hybrid of choreia and graphia.
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Some frame by frame animations are connecting different moments, like intermezzos, revisiting some cutting edge abstract painting
of early 20th Century Avant Garde deconstructing some of their euclidean compositions in order to find a new counterbalance.
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Animation is conceptually the key of cinema, based on a continuous movement of single still frames.
This chain of movements creates a space of transformations. The magic lies in the “in between”, like a dancer movement from one point
to an another, here between a keyframe and the next one. It is a permutation from an intimate space into a more permeable,
relational one, where rational lines and more irrational shapes coexist, intertwine, melt together and expand.
Anna is not only an inhabitant of a context; moving from a point to an another, she is creating space, where what was inside goes outside.
Featured On/Screenings:
Endless Biennale, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, curated by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, NYC, US, 2018