Perpetuum mobile

2007, video-installation, 2’ 32’’, color and b/w, mute

The video Perpetuum mobile is a video-installation integrated within a determined architectural space. The movement of a basketball, reproduced in a scale 1:1, is projected. Due to its fixed size, the projection area is suggested by the room itself. In between pillars, walls or other accessories, as doors, wardrobes, the ball moves confined by them.

Its movement, related to the well-known size of a basketball as object, gives the visitor a sort of abstract ruler, capable of measuring the space. Bouncing around the projection area, the basketball perpetually loses and regains color oscillating between a colored presence and a black and white remembrance. The object’s own shadow is virtually presented and a fourth dimension is opened within the same room.

The confrontation within the architecture, the basketball, and its projection as an image, blurs the border between real and virtual. In an osmotic exchange between the two spheres, the movement of the ball starts to be real and a dynamic is inscribed through the image into the real world.

“The ball, deprived from its original context and function, its movement cut and sequenced and looped in slow motion, becomes a neutralized abstraction, a sole measurement visualizing the virtual space between two borders, just as the pendulum of a metronome makes time audible.”[1]

[1] Pushing against the walls – on the temporary interventions of Marco Fedele di Catrano, by Eva Scharrer, Unbearable dissertation on a broken line, CURA.BOOKS, Rome, 2011

Exhibitions:

Latitude and Space, Scrjabin Museum, Moskow, 2014

Unbearable dissertation on a broken line, Galerie Mario Iannelli, Berlin, 2011

So Far So West, standard/deluxe, Lausanne, 2009

Perpetuum Mobile, Galleria Next Door, Rome, 2007