Rz Piscium is an
Insatiable
Eater of Worlds
Film: 07:24 min
Italy, 2019
The video work RZ Piscium is an Insatiable Eater of Worlds unsettles through a candid exploration of Bulimia as a social reality, and metaphor for modern society's consumerisms.
The interpellation of the subject through performance questions the predominant view of the eating disorder as a consequence, or response, to strategies of gendering the body. What is usually referred to as a “self-image crisis” is encountered in the film as a crisis of representation of the individual, hinging on the inability to confront the source of social influences, to speak to power and be heard.
The female character takes on the role of the trickster figure, playing at the edge of self-destructive tendencies - an allusion to the accelerationist ideas increasingly common across the current technological and political landscape.
Implicit in this statement, there is the underlying analogy between the bulimic’s binge-and-purge cycles and consumer culture. Physicality becomes the metaphoric vehicle of collective desire existing in the unstable tension with the requirement to get back in firm control.
In a montage of two scenarios, the film employs a hybrid cinematic language, combining a surrealist visual technique with the vital performativity typical of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, allowing fluidity between improvisation and scripted performance.
This convergence of methods resembles the in-between state of different psychological spaces falling into the narrative identity of the self, in the attempt of restoring continuity between the personal past, present, and future. The use of constructed nonsense, props and gestures charged with symbolic qualities, melt playfully to subvert Western aesthetic sense and stereotypes.
The title is inspired by the 2017 Astronomical Journal report on the “RZ Piscium” star, orbiting at 550 light-years away in the constellation Pisces, and dubbed by Indiana University astronomer Catherine Pilachowski as “eater of worlds” for being surrounded by the wreckage of planets it has consumed.
The soundtrack of the video features recordings of Sun Drum sound experiments kindly provided by Terredaria - an Italian association promoting the research and early-childhood education in sonic art. In the film, the primordial drum sounds and the female vocals allow multiple identities and perspectives to emerge.
Special thanks to
Ilenia Orciuoli, Giuspeppina Nitto,
Monica Basso, Colin Tobelem
