Alice Pedroletti and Andrea Familari
u-form.earth (2020 ongoing)
“u-form is a living artwork – a database – in which the recordings are translated into organic movements that act on the objects themselves through the distortion of their form and colours. Moving fluidly in a non-existent space, they access and leave a digital dimension attempting to create a truthful representation of what sound tells us.
The unviability of travelling, due to the world pandemic from COVID-19, pushed the artists’ research towards a new mode of expression. The project takes on an identitarian significance, creating a virtual community and non-political geography.
The distance becomes a concrete instrument to relate to communities and territories the artists can’t meet and connect to. The two artists find themselves studying and elaborating on a new cartography, expanding their research towards the field of digital geography.
u-form, initially conceived as a reflection on oral tradition and the role of archaeology in society, now examines “sounds” and “objects” as vehicles for the visual representation of the landscape. The artwork proposes the compilation of a living archive of different territories, no longer defined by the direct experience of travel, but only imagined through a different travel experience. In a loop which is the process, research and relationship between artistic practices and historical context, the database is intended as a perpetual place for a new and possible geography.
The artwork responds to our current situation and proposes a possibility for the future to engage virtually with people and territories that could be inaccessible. It challenges the political aspect of naming an environment, and it raises questions on the property of Nature. It proposes a new way of mapping a physical area through a digital and immaterial organic architecture of a place no longer defined by boundaries, preferably by a new and ongoing generative geography. It’s a community artwork where the artists are tools, as the digital machines and the contributors are. All to serve as witnesses of our environment, it doesn’t matter which one: defining it its an anthropocentric action.
u-form also questions the materiality of the objects, transforming them into visual findings. Introducing them into the digital realm is the action of future archaeology in which digital memorabilia carry and preserve their singularity – like those relics that are recovered during excavations – losing their specific territoriality.
u-form is presented here through three video-frames.
The database and the video-loops presenting it will be online in February 2021.
For private screening, please contact the artists through the IG account: uform.earth
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