FULL CREDITS

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Concept and Performance by Irene Fiordilino

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Photography by Aidan Good

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Performed at:

2019, Nou Wave Gallery, The Old Biscuit Factory, London, UK

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Synopsis: 
Trinacria (which means ‘three pointed’) is the most ancient name of Sicily, the triangular island at the bottom of the Italian Peninsula, from where the artist is from. Sicily - isolated and yet so close to the continent - is a land of water and fire, Arabs and Norsemen, Greek Mythology and Arthurian Romance. To be Sicilian means to have blue eyes and dark hair, a fair skin and a fiery temperament, feet which deepen into centuries of history, and the urgency to take to the sea, travel, change perspective, follow - one by one - all those cultural threads that tangled together in one syncretic DNA.

 

Inspired by the symbolic shape of Sicily, the aim of this work is to challenge the concept of ‘shape’ as something that does not belong to stillness but depends on the dynamic relation which each spectator establishes with his environment, validating at the same time the relativity and the uniqueness of any possible perspective.

The body is surrounded by a highly dense emptiness, the colourful lines both on the floor and on the pictures manifest a geometry of gravitational links and intersecting perspectives belonging to different planes and connecting the performer with its potential observers.

In a similar way, Sicily is a land of blooming barrenness, a region which for thousands of years has been the joining link of any possible route through the Mediterranean; the colourful intersecting triangles symbolise the political and cultural influences which moulded Sicily and its place into this world.    

 

The performance can be seen as an ongoing process of embodiment and inhabitation, challenging the space ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ qualities through the encountering of its inner structure with the architecture of the moving body.

Kinaesthetic memory and Archive merge together in a unitary experience; to be a shape, to be within a shape, to integrate a shape and to shape the space, are the inspirational thoughts underpinning both the visual design and the choreographic investigation.

The same thoughts, transposed on a different level, question the cultural identity of the Choreographer as an islander, a world citizen, a Sicilian, a product of both centenary, multicultural stratification and current globalisation.