Day Three: Folds in Reflective Cloth
A priority within my practice has been to ask how installation space is extended, reinterpreted and affected by images of space, and in this context, cinematic space. How do I come to know any space, physical or simulated, and what role do digital images play in these readings? Further, what part do other images (painting and photographs) play in interpreting space and context? There are several scenes within Red Desert that I’ve been watching and rewatching. At this moment, I’m not sure why they have caught my attention. One way to get to know these spaces might be to draw them. Another way would be to model them. Each of these scenes carries a specific meaning and context within the film. I’ve been wondering how these meanings might be multiplied, intervened in and recast – much in the way that fragments of Dante’s poem are reinterpreted by this film – then set against the context of this former schoolhouse.
Much of today has been spent painting, looking at and attempting to interpret folds in reflective cloth. I’ve spent the evening with my boys, making dinner, watching Hey Duggee, playing in the garden and counting leaves.
Angela Dalle Vacche, in her book Cinema and Painting, suggests that in Red Desert, Antonioni stages the clash of old and new through the interplay of history and spatiality and through his use of objects and decors. “One could argue that Antonioni has found the iconography of this staging in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico,” she argues.
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