.
.
.
Lety
Artist: Cristiano Berti (Italy)
May 23 - June 13. 2014
The astonished observation of memory and the traces that generated it, coming undone, the labyrinth-like relationship between personal experience and the more vast space of history, are all features that emerge in a circular fashion in Berti’s works, in a logic of recursive astonishment, organised in successive concentric circles.
In Lety (2009) Berti explores this complex circularity through a work that is cross between a video, a documentary and reportage. A film-based object of a hybrid nature, Lety is the story of a journey, the result of the artist’s time spent in Slovakia during which he came into contact with two musicians, František ?u?a and Martina ?u?ová, from the Roma community settled in the eastern region of the country. The film developed from Berti’s proposal to accompany them on a long car trip to the border between Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Ferko and Martinka are both blind and suffer from numerous ailments that confine them to wheelchairs and they only speak in Slovak and Romani. These factual details are the ingredients for the action triggered by Berti who puts himself in the position of participating observer of the scene inside the vehicle, without being able to interact verbally with Ferko and Martinka due to the lack of a shared language, but only film them, leaving space to their songs and their spontaneous accounts about themselves, as the forests roll past in the background. (...) The length of the trip and the film, the serious physical disabilities of the protagonists, the memories of the ghosts of the Romani holocaust that hover in the forest-laden scenery of Eastern-Europe and the contrast between past and present, make Lety a multi-faceted documentary. In the words of the artist himself, it is a device rather than a documentary, a crossroads of stories and paradoxes that make the spectator face a series of radical questions on Europe and its identity destined to last like a long echo over time.
Luigi Fassi
Text extract from Cristiano Berti. Vertigo of Reality, Allemandi & Co., 2012
.
.
http://www.cristianoberti.it/lety_more.php
.
.
