Piero Pizzul & Ulrike Pusch-Holbinger

Italia, Germania • Italy, Germany

Let’s admit it right from the start: the video by Piero Pizzul and Ulrike Pusch-Holbinger aims to be a provocation, as is clearly stated in the title Orthogenesis, which etymologically represents the progressive evolution or autogenesis assumed in the hypothesis that life tends to evolve in a linear direction, urged by an internal or external driving force.

A careful reading of the images, which follow one another at a fast pace, following the rhythm of the music, carries us away in an involutionary experience that leads to annihilation. Rather than the expression of a driving force, this compositum manifests the creeping psychological pathology of an economic crisis that leaves no more room for the dreams or hopes of young people affected by a syndrome of absence of the future.

Personal experience is marked by disappointment for the failure of the European dream, exasperated by the events that overwhelmed Greece. Brief flashes of memory light up meaningful scenes: street protests with the police, a car inhabited by homeless persons, the agora with the Athens Parliament in the background and - not by chance - a Volkswagen.

One can escape reality only by taking refuge in a dream, which is transformed here into a nightmare filled with hallucinations that seem to lead to madness. It is a tunnel with no way out.

Yet many voices of artists, intellectuals, writers and politicians, and ordinary people have praised the renewal that was hoped for with the creation of a New Europe, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Others, including the minimalist poet Inge Elsa Laird, intuitively expressed a certain reserve fraught with negative forecasts with regard to the state policies, as in her lyrical composition The State where she declares: “They made a business to pull out weeds, never in their own garden, but in the language of law and order.

They have sown grass and planted trees, ... but the grass did not grow
there is no life for the earth...”.

Nevia Capello, Curator