Flatform
History of a Tree

www.historyofatree.org

Project supported by the Italian Council (6. Edition, 2019) program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

Argos, Bruxelles - EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam - Light Cone, Paris -  University of Lisbon - VDB Video Data Bank, Chicago - Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Amsterdam, Chicago, Lisbona - TOC Centre




The movie

History of a Tree is a portrait and the subject is both a living non-human organism and the territory that it has lived in for a long time. The work has the ambition of becoming part of the field of portraiture, a fundamental component of the course of the whole history of art, rewriting, however, the nature of the subject, the methods of development and the technique of expression of the portrait. In fact, in this project the subject is a non-human living organism that is portrayed through moving images and sounds that have been localized in space, which then show the portrayed subject as an ideal witness to almost a thousand years of the history of an entire territory.
The tree at the center of the project is an oak born about 900 years ago, also known as the Oak of the Hundred Knights, and the place is an area around the town of Tricase.
This vegetal organism, marked both by a life in continuous growth and by an immovable fixed entity, is a perennial witness to the development of a place, that of its relevance, of the stories that have crossed its path in almost a thousand years and of cultures and languages that followed each other and that still coexist.
The film has dialogues in Arbëresh, Romani, Griko, Byzantine Greek, Albanian, Yiddish, Turkish, Spanish, French and Salentino dialect.
All the musics were unpublished and were recorded expressly for this film.The dialogues are by Flatform.


The videoinstallation

The videoinstallation is made up of a robotic sculpture which projects the film on all the surfaces of the exhibition space through a built-in video projector. The film moves in the room, 360° and on three axes, sliding on the four walls, as well as on the floor and the ceiling. In this way, the movement of the images returns, setting it in the entire exhibition space, the long plan-sequence that constitutes the film, faithfully reproducing the movements that the camera has made, through drones and steadycam. In doing so, the portrait of the tree and the history of the territory become a real inner skin of the space. Through the robotic sculpture, the duration of the cycle of movements of the projector coincides with that of the film, or approximately 22 minutes. The sound, spatialized through 8 sound sources arranged in the room, allows the visitor to immerse himself in the sound vortex, as well as in the visual one created by the video installation.

English translation by Steve Piccolo

www.historyofatree.org
www.flatform.it