Mapping the afterlife
Media: installation with video, maps, sound recordings.
In this project I seek to show a vision of immigration placed in a broader context, in order to make possible to analyze the act of immigration as a part of the deep human requirement to believe in the tangible existence of a place of happiness. This "territory" can assume abstract and immaterial forms, but most of the time it is also assimilated to a physical space, perhaps a space difficult of access, but whose existence those imagining it assumed to be completely real and concrete.
Thus, the project proposes to relate the problem of today's immigration in Europe with the imagination of the afterlife in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The project establishes this relationship by using maps, audio registration of stories made by immigrants about their long haul, medieval texts, and images from these experiences.
This work wants to show how the real stake of these displacements is bound up with the aspiration to an idea of happiness and the necessity to give it a concrete and material form.
The final presentation comprises an installation including: maps, stories and still images and videos, arranged in the exhibition area. The stories are presented by audio recordings accessible through headphones, the maps are printed and hung on the walls and, finally, the images are screened as slide shows.