Darkness Descending is a video response to the album Tono de Lobo by Cuchufleta.  The music was composed by Gregorio Fontén.  The video is by Francesco Cincotta.

NOTES

Destino was initially intended as a meditation on the city of Leipzig, and secondly as a meditation on cities in general.  It is intentionally chronologically and historically sloppy not because the history of Leipzig is obscure, the facts are easily obtainable, but because I wanted to condense history in a poetic package that involved the present, past and future. The moment is singular, the past is interpretable; the future speculation.  Placed together they are a colored lens, a way we filter our experiences, interpret our lives.

My life, probably little different from countless others, has a filter that interprets reality in split second flashes of colors and categories, many events contain combinations of both, some combinations are spot-on; others inaccurate or inappropriate for the event. That is all well and good for the actions daily life requires; art wants something else and what it demands is not simple solutions but a perennial parade foggy possibilities.  Art is best when it stimulates: visually, intellectually or conceptually.  It leads and hopefully leads to a more astute awareness.

All the cities I have known have shared the desire to represent and be remembered for their cultural innovations, and all of them have had some very dark moments. It was these thoughts and the present debate over immigration that influenced the video.  All the work I do has some shared elements: the passage of time and the various philosophical and historical interpretations of time and specific events; a dash of chance and poetry.  The list is far from exhaustive.

The text of Destino is meant as a compressed poetic discussion of the perennial issues of the outsider, the refugee and the hunted. It contains dialogue that expresses surprise, anger, mystery, fear, wonder and many other emotions. The film depends on the expression of these emotions in an environment conflicting confusion and wonder .

The video was filmed in Leipzig, a city that for centuries was an international trading post poised between Eastern and Western Europe. During the Nazi era Leipzigʼs Jewish population was eliminated, those that were not sent to the death camps either emigrated or were successfully hidden. After the war the Russians took control and in turn interred and exterminated many thousands. It remained Russian until the revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989, a revolution that began in Leipzig. Today Leipzig is part of a reunited Germany, a young international city, a city with a feeling distinctly different from its counterparts in West Germany: idealistic and seeking a future that neither denies its past nor aligns completely with the West.

Instrumento de Luz was a video response by Francesco Cincotta to a hanging sculpture created by Cecilia Vicuña.  The video in turn inspired composer Marc-Antonio Consoli to create and record the music.  Finally, Cecilia Vicuña wrote a poem to accompany the music and the video.

The two videos shown are part of a larger project that includes a book of photography and poetry.  The project was undertaken during  residency with the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice in 2007.

The San Giorgio video was based on the childhood memory of a widow, dressed in the black of morning then common in southern Europe, ascending the stairs of our local church in Central New York State on her knees, beseeching God to answer her prayers.

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Empire Red is a Blues Poem recorded a year after the attack on the World Trade Centre on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.  It mourns not only those who lost their lives in the bombing, but all those who would suffer from the wrath and political opportunism of the United States.

The performances by the poet Cecilia Vicuña and the sound artist Charlie Morrow were spontaneous responses to the others performance and were captured as still images by Francesco Cincotta and recorded by Charlie Morrow.  The photographs and the audio were later combined by Francesco to produce this slideshow.

The poem, written in the Lacanian dialect of the Basilicata region of Italy, is by Raffaele Carlomagno.  The video was done by Francesco Cincotta while he was a resident at the Palazzo Rinaldi artist’s residency program in Noépoli, Basilicata.

Francesco and Raffaele, who was a neighbour of the Palazzo Rinaldi, met almost immediately after Francesco arrived in Noépoli and within days were working on this video.

The video is followed below by photographs taken of Noépoli.

Click on the thumbnail to view the gallery

Six pieces of music by Claudio Leisse given randomly to video maker Francesco Cincotta over a period of a year, with little or no input about the background of the compositions. The final order of the films and the content was left totally up to chance interpretation.