MUSE

Video 4K, 13’ 30’’

Courtesy the artist, Ex Elettrofonica and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence

ELENA MAZZI

The artistic vision of Elena Mazzi (b. 1984 in Reggio Emilia) deals with the relationship of human beings to their environment. Taking a primarily anthropological approach, she explores and records the personal and collective identity of a given territory, highlighting different forms of interaction and transformation.

In the video Muse, Elena Mazzi leads viewers into the nightmare of gender violence through the disorienting beauty of the Greek and Roman statues in the Antiquarium of Palazzo Grimani in Venice. The video begins by showing details of the interiors as if they were still inhabited, while a voiceover ushers us into the private world of the person who lived, or perhaps still lives, in those solitary rooms. The visual rhythm changes as the camera begins to show close-ups of the bodies and faces of these women and men from antiquity; bodies that have been restored, put back together, with breaks and mends in the marble; details of broken fingers; a series of legs and bodies; male and female statues seen in relation to each other from different angles, with rays of natural light cutting in between. These are statues that have been stolen from other places, in an era of brutal colonialism that clashes with the perfect aesthetic balance of their arrangement. They are bodies that speak to us of distant lands and times, of love, violence, of myth, pillage, death, and rebirth. The voiceover tells stories of rape, of abduction, of violent beings who transform themselves in order to capture their sexual prey: helpless, beautiful human beings, both male and female. The text has been constructed by selecting myths in which violence plays a pivotal role, putting them into a broader narrative that ties this mythological past to the present and highlights how certain behavioral dynamics are still the same today. This visually powerful narrative takes us into the violent world of myth, based on power and domination, where violence is directly employed by a wrathful, lustful god.