Simone Origio's research aims to
investigate the theme of the relationship, in a historical moment where - due
to the fear produced by the world pandemic - we are witnessing more and more
frequently phenomena of isolation and distrust of others.
The confrontation with an unknown and
invisible enemy has strengthened the experience of separation from what is
equally unknown and invisible in us, which Carl Jung summarized in the concept
of Shadow; this should be understood as the representation of what the individual
does not recognize, repress or reject because it is incompatible with the
consciously chosen form of life.
It is not possible for man to experience
it directly, as it presents a character contrary to the subject to which he
belongs: in fact, the encounter with oneself - says the Swiss psychoanalyst -
is "one of the most unpleasant experiences, from which one escapes by
projecting all this which is negative on the world around us ".
The question, therefore, is transposed
into the relationship: what we internally guard can be revealed by reflection,
as in a mirror, only in the face of the other (lover, friend, relative), but,
as unknown, it appears hostile or fearful.
The Shadow also emerges on a collective
level: according to the monster theory of Jeffrey Cohen (1996), man, in order
to provide a body to fears, desires, anxieties and fantasies and to give them
autonomous life, has created monsters. These creatures, therefore - as the
Latin etymology of the term denotes (monstrum, from the verb monere = to show)
- by vocation they have the task of revealing what is hidden and thus bringing
man back to himself: not by chance in myths and in fairy tales the motif of the
hero frequently recurs in comparison with monstrous beings.
In this sense, the relationship should
be reread as an initiatory path of renewal, a loss to find oneself, during
which to drop the masks and open up to an authentic, generative encounter.
All these suggestions are found in a
single symbol: the labyrinth. Kingdom of the Minotaur in the Greek myth, place
of death and rebirth, this structure of millenary tradition is organized around
a center, the intermediate point of a paradoxical path that obliges us to go
back and forth, to unite the outside and the internal, thus evoking the
possible synthesis of opposites.
Hermann Kern, curator of the exhibition
In Labirinto set up at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan, already in 1981
described it as a meeting place:
“You don't get lost in the labyrinth,
you find yourself in the labyrinth. In the labyrinth you don't meet the
Minotaur, in the labyrinth you meet yourself ".
It is in effect an archetypal
transformative image, which must be recognized "the ability to reorient
the flow of psychic energy and change its specific form of manifestation".
The empty and indefinite space of the center, where opposites meet, is the
place where the new potential is revealed.
The short film explores the internal
relational dimension made explicit by the interaction of two young dancers,
where the authentic gesture becomes a word.
The experience is transported to a
dreamlike context, out of time, where the dream is a place without real
boundaries or rules and allows the emergence of a free narrative line that
music, unedited and mounted on images, accompanies and underlines. It is a
journey from dark to light, a gradual awareness.
The device is a reference to the topos
of hypnerotomachy, or the "battle of love in a dream", used by
Francesco Colonna for his allegorical novel printed in Venice in 1499 by Aldus
Manutius.
As in Polifilo's Dream, where the two
main characters learn to love each other in a path of profound inner
transformation, so the couple of dancers, involved in a mirror-like dynamic of
approach, complete a paradoxical path made of lights and shadows, attraction
and distancing, contrasts and openings, fear and courage: precisely for this
"labyrinth".
The places of the Venetian reality, on
the occasion of the 1600th anniversary of the Serenissima, become the setting
for interior experience and theater of relationships.
