7′ 58”, color, 3/4, frame by frame cel/cut out animation + VHS footage, 2006
Directed by Sara Bonaventura

Inspired by:
Medusa by Sylvia Plath,
Medusa by Jean Clair,
Medusa by Caravaggio,
Grande Rosso by Alberto Burri,
Requiem Blue by Yves Klein

“I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe,
to spy, to watch, to scrutinize oneself and others, to be nothing but a big,
slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye.” Nabokov, The Eye

This is one of my very first video experiment.
I think after having seen this C.Bozulich asked me to do a video for her Evangelista.

The Medusa has power over the subject, evoking suffocation and the obstruction of speech.
The Medusa’s power has an archetypal dimension. There are connections between Motherhood and Medusa.
During the centuries the serpent-hair, an emblem of fertility once, has become the symptom of evil.
The Medusa’s gaze is a reflection of a traumatized psyche, but also a way to unsettle the feminine,
becoming impersonal, captured by the otherness of the encounter.
Through a loss and a rejection of the bell of the womb as well.
What is glimpsed is a shadow of a woman, a feminine subjectivity that is unspeakable and uncanny.
Mum is her. Then the umbilicus is cut. The daughter is lost.
Loss is found. She becomes her. She becomes the object: Medusa.

Screenings:
Spazio Barnum, Bologna (IT), 2014
VIF, Venice Industries festival, Venice (IT), 2008

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,
You house your unnerving head, God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of
departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.

In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta

Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.

Sylvia Plath, Medusa