Glaucocamaleo

Glaucocamaleo is Luca Trevisani’s first feature-length film. Presented in the CinemaXXI category of the last Rome Film Festival, from 22 March it will feature in a solo exhibition by the artist at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence.

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo
A comprehensive vision of Luca Trevisani's film absorbs not only the succession of hybrid and sci-fi sequences but the path travelled by every shot of the object, place and sound in a mix of artificial sets and natural landscapes – all bound by a single narrator’s voice, that of Kary Mullis.
This US biochemist with anything but orthodox visions asks what is out there to be measured. Everything is out there and everything experiences shifts and micro changes, like this film which constructs its narrative fabric and visual force via transformation and a mix of cinematographic languages. But where are we? Where does the nature manifest itself, in what subterranean zones, grooves and furrows does the water, the focal element of this dimension, flow? We shall try to imagine and re-describe some of the scenes in Glaucocamaleo, starting from the original landscapes where it was conceived and developed.

Martina Angelotti: The first “landscape” came to me in the first lines of the two actors. The landscape takes shape with the narration, travelling very fast on the ground, through multiform spaces and materialising in different ways. Every place has a function in terms of imagination and usability. I have heard conflicting opinions on the first scene of the film: overly narrative, overly fictitious, overly performed, detached, cryptic and impenetrable. I believe the decision to put two actors at the beginning served to contextualise the cinema/environment, the format and the cinema/language. It is an expedient that draws on tradition, reactivates the codes of the narrative form and presages the start of a story that is more to be "visualised" than "understood".

Luca Trevisani: I am pleased that you have said that; it epitomises my intentions and, if they got through to you, it works. The beginning is a deliberately harsh point, quite ambiguous and deliberately unresolved. The whole film plays with different registers, it is like bringing different linguistic formats and codes together in forced cohabitation that generates meaning but does not define a categorical direction. It is a playful noisy coexistence.

What makes Glaucocamaleo a film rather than a video-art experiment or a long video is this very attempt to produce meaning via many different codes, methods and languages that have been used, bent and distorted to satisfy the needs of communication. Tradition is employed but lightly and it is the sound work in the dialogue, as too in all the rest of the film, that expresses the contrived and unrealistic "construction". The audio mixing is as important as the place and both underline the fact that the beginning is an oneiric and abstract bubble, as credible as a singer moving his/her lips out of synch. The film begins with a dialogue and then becomes a story told by the images and a voice that becomes increasingly mental, until it dissolves into a symbolic flow, a jungle of signs to be passed through without fear.

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo
Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo, location 1. Photo Francesco Mariani

M.A.: Interior 1. A glass phial falls and explodes on the floor opening into a new place. The movie camera travels slowly across a wooden bridge and enters a hole. Where are we?

L.T.: The ice cave on the Furka Pass is hewn in the ice. It has been opened every year since the late 1800s, initially for climatic and meteorological studies but now for tourists.

Like many of the places chosen for Glaucocamaleo, it is not a location, namely a landscape; they are settings that because of their history or their conformation appear and behave like sculptures or environments that I had thought of creating. Once discovered, I merely visit them with the movie camera and try to interview them and, as in every interview worth its mettle, I had to prod and push them to say what they know and take for granted, bringing their character and latent content out into the open.

The Cave is straight out of the imagery of a Jules Verne-like journey of scientific exploration. It was originally created at the time the Captain Nemo stories were being written and people dreamt of circumnavigating the world in 80 days. Today, these dreams are reality. James Cameron (remain with the cinema) explored the Mariana Trench alone, going far deeper than the Nautilus and dreaming just as much as Melies.

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Fotografia Francesco Mariani
Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Photo Francesco Mariani

M.A.: Interior 5. Water. Sometimes a hidden river slips beneath us. Water is a timeless breath, it never ages. Is the camera peering into a swimming pool?

L.T.: I wanted to build a map, a journey to places that epitomise an ideal of a now historic future, one that has not come true and that has lost its drive. This generated visions like something out of a sci-fi film, as in the case of the pools of the Museo dell'Acqua in Reggio Emilia, which look like Spectre’s secret base but are actually the old foundations of a Marco Zanuso skyscraper that was to tower in the heart of the Po Valley, converted to a basin for the Reggio aqueduct. The voice of Kary Mullis reciting “Water is a timeless breath, it never ages” illustrates this constant, ageless flow that becomes clear in the Reggio aqueduct when, around lunchtime, you see the pools empty fast – when men and women use water to wash up.

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Fotografia Francesco Mariani
Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Photo Francesco Mariani

M.A.: Exterior/day. Snow. A mountaineer climbs towards the mountain summit taking a galvanised triangle with him. This object dominates the scene and dictates the rhythm of the pace (interior) and gaze (exterior).

L.T.: The climbers take the segments of a solar cooker with them; once mounted, the force of the sun dissolves the ice sculpture. I wanted to set up an unstoppable flow of matter and adopted the same principle to film the cycle of water and treat the objects, without philologically respecting sources, provenances and authorship. The solar cooker was maltreated on the snow; the ice modules originated from the Giogali “hooks” in a lamp designed by Angelo Mangiarotti. We copied its form to create the mould for our modular icicles. If, as many people tell me, films are my most successful sculptures then I am right to apply the logic and laws of editing to the matter in the objects I create, don’t you think?

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Fotografia Raffaele Marzocchi
Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Photo Raffaele Marzocchi

M.A.: Interior 4. Ice. Ice is a time machine. It is the past in the present. A sequence of pieces of ice that break, bang against each other, change shape and catch fire.

L.T.: I have always been fascinated by technical materials and instruments, whether distilling coils or mountaineering grippers and nuts. They all demonstrate specific knowledge, hidden behind mysterious and often extremely beautiful and attractive forms. For this scene I decided to block the crampons enable us to walk without slipping, both in the city and at high altitudes, in the ice. I shifted the barycentre from function to aesthetic, building ice forms that we tested by hitting one against the other, on a black set created with the abstraction typical of a science lab, and with a vaguely sadomasochistic air.

M.A.: Exterior/day. Mirrors. I saw the photograph of this very place at the Pierre Huyge exhibition in Paris. He took the visitors on a psychogeographical exploration. What is there here that we have not seen or has not had its image reflected?

L.T.:
The mirrors in the film form part of the largest burning lens now in existence. It is an xxl version of the one Archimedes is said to have adopted to burn the Roman ships attacking Syracuse. The mirror is a huge concave disc composed of many reflecting modules and works via dual reflection. The main mirror is immobile and 10000 mirrors dotted across the terraces of the hill facing it reflect the light onto the central mirror, which is as big as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. This concentrates its energy into a powerful band of focused light, increasing the temperature on an area only slightly bigger than an A4 sheet of paper and reaching a temperature that is approximately half that thought to be found at the Earth’s core. This, too, is a landscape of the historic future, a leftover of the 1950s’ idea of future; the idea of good and redeeming technology to place before the atomic fear.

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Fotografia Raffaele Marzocchi
Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Photo Raffaele Marzocchi

M.A.: Another scenario stems from the sound component. The three dimensions of sound, image and voice allow us to listen to the sounds inside the film.

L.T.: A black cave where what matters are images in movement and sounds. The sound work is crucial to the film and decisive in the video installation. Sound allows you to pass from dynamic narrative moments to other far more static ones in which the live sounds and field recordings, the places’ voice changes your perceptive attitude and make you slow your metabolism down, and give in to the landscape. Sound expresses the dichotomy that runs through Glaucocamaleo, the doing and the building and the listening, passiveness and losing yourself in the flow of things.

Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Fotografia Raffaele Marzocchi
Luca Trevisani, Glaucocamaleo. Photo Raffaele Marzocchi

M.A.: The final scene is an important triangulation of sound (electronic), text (the voice of Kary Mullis, who makes the language his own) and image (the ocean, "her", the overhead vision from a helicopter, the two seas embracing each other). It seems almost like a synthesis of the film, don’t you think?

L.T.: I hadn’t thought of it but, put that way, yes the end is a synthesis of the three souls in the film. There is a curiosity for the life of matter developed from a poetic stance that interprets the world, while the sound cools the whole and takes us elsewhere, opening different scenarios and making the whole elusive and slippery.

M.A.: From cinema space to exhibition space. The 3D version of the film. What will happen at your next exhibition in Florence? What kind of place will you take us to see?

L.T.: Glaucocamaleo is a work platform that gels in three different states. It is a film to be watched seated in a cinema; it is a book of essays on the places in this cultural-sentimental journey, published by Humboldt books; and it is an exhibition. At the Museo Marino Marini, Glaucocamaleo will be a hollow space, a dark cave brought to life by images and sounds; it is like the subterranean lake we visited at Hinterbrühl, pulsating and alive with images and sounds. It will be a large video environment, one in which to spend time, a thermal sculpture in which to immerse yourself and the impressions of which must be registered with the senses, with the body.

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