Go! Go! Heaven (2017)
Video, 1 min 30 sec, 16:9, Stereo, Music: A piece of the nature by Haldor Paulsson
Video, 1 min 30 sec, 16:9, Stereo, Music: A piece of the nature by Haldor Paulsson
The inspiration for this video work is an interview with Pasolini on Youtube, in which he criticized consumer society after WWII as new fascism which destroyed the tradition and culture in Italy. He said, “It destroyed the different realities of each person, and removed the reality from the various existential style which Italia has created in its history”. His words remind me of what happened in my home country after being defeated in WWII, a hyper-developed consumer society emerged that destroyed our tradition and re-created a new culture.
Pasolini shows “a collage of high art, moviemaking, and real poverty” in his film La Ricotta (1963), setting this film as a reference point in the video collage work Go! Go! Heaven (2017) I draw upon and interpret the following concepts into the video work: WWII, consumer society as new fascism, symbol and metaphors of Christianity. When analysing La Ricotta (1963) from a symbolic perspective, we can find several metaphors of Christianity, such as bread, grape, wine, or the seven deadly sins like gluttony or lusts of the flesh. (In a Japanese Buddhistic context, gluttony or lusts are also categorized as one of the evil passions). On the climax scene of the film, in which the protagonist, an actor playing Christ dies on the cross, we notice the sound effect of an explosion of a bomb. I am not sure of Pasolini’s intention for using such sound, however, it reminds me the historical fact that the atomic bomb, which terminated WWII, was exploded at that very spot above the Catholic church in Nagasaki. For this reason, I collected commercial footage with grapes, anime/movie scenes of gluttony, and combined it with the poems translated in Japanese and narrated by the synthesized voice, which Orson Welles is reading on one scene in this film.
I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Appennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilights, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, for the privilege
of recording them from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a fetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.
the poem from "La Ricotta" by Pier Paolo Pasolini
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Appennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilights, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, for the privilege
of recording them from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a fetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.
the poem from "La Ricotta" by Pier Paolo Pasolini