video performance in Venice in Februar 2017

Persona was produced during my 10 month scholarship Villa Massimo 2016/17. It is a video performance that was created through my work with statues in the Vatican Museums. Soon came the carnival. If I have already been to Italy, I wanted to experience the carnival in Venice in February 2017. I was interested in the masks and costumes that people wear. I wondered what it was like to wear a mask from the cast of your own face. A young student from Rome, Amedeo Porru, helped me to create the mask. The mask was made of plaster. I went to Venice with Janine Lincke, a good friend I had met in Rome. She filmed me on a gondola while we glided through the narrow waterways. The mask, which is called "persona" in ancient Greek, shows the understanding of a person in ancient and early medieval times. A person was always the superficial face. Even in the Greek tragedy, choirs with masks always appeared, representing the face of the many. But it was not customary for a single person to refer to himself as a person, unless he was a king. The present understanding of us as "person" indicates the degree of individualization: Today, each one of us is his king, wants to hide at carnival to be different.

costume, plaster mask, gondola, camera

Video 12:17 min Mp4

Camera : Janine Lincke Editing: Branka Pavlovic Assistant: Amedeo Porru