theVices#1
VainGlory
”Where pride desires to have some excellency and majority, vainglory, not even satisfied with this,
wants to manifest it and show it off, in order to acquire praise, name, honor and fame among the
people".
(Jacopo Passavanti, Mirror of True Penance, 1354)
Vainglory is a
big Audio/Visual sculpture that stages the obligation to stage ourselves that anybody
experiences in everyday life on social networks. It took place for the first time in december 2021
, by invading and subverting
the rules and perspectives of the Petrella theater, a wonderful historical Italian theater built in 1864.
We feed our social profiles with the best possible content, trying to compress our
existence into a timeline that can be envied as much as we envy others'.
The democratization of artistic production pushes us to a condition in which everyone became both artist
and audience of himself, transforming audiences from tendentially passive masses into a creative
multitude able to compulsively produce all kinds of contents.
SOCIALITY becomes SOCIAL and produces a condition always poised between examples of random
creativity,
sometimes
surprising, and a consistent background buzz.
In these conditions, the stage no longer exists because THE STAGE IS EVERYWHERE.
This is why the stage of the theater is empty.
Instead, stalls and balconies are crowded by 150 digital devices, each transmitting a different
audiovisual content.
The stage is no longer a place of performances. Having lost its ability to be a pulpit it becomes a privileged
observation point,
from where we can look at this perpetual creative flood which is able to enlighten us about the
contemporary.
Cyclically, the background buzz generated by the overlapping contents of the 150 devices is
modeled and transformed into a sound and visual sculpture; observed and listened from the stage, the
crowd of devices becomes an orchestra performing shreds of an hypothetical contemporary piece, to eventually go back, after a few minutes, to the background noise of our lives.