Artists Elisa Turco Liveri and Salvatore Insana, known as Dehors/Audela since 2010 are producing a video art work with eight students from the Istituto Carlo Cattaneo for the BNL Media Art Festival.

The artists started their lab by reviewing a range of video material with the students to help them understand the world of digital and performance art.

Their project, entitled “Performing the Daily,” focuses on the relationship between the self and space as a way of extracting emotions and representing them in a video. In order to do this, Elisa and Salvatore are having the students do theatrical and performance exercises to help them express themselves without fear or shyness.

If friendship in high school is a symbiotic relationship based on sharing, the students’ idea to represent this bond is to film themselves performing a single action from the same point of view: waking up, getting dressed and arriving at school. The merging of the students performing the same action aims to create a sole character.

Besides the workshop at the Istituto Cattaneo, Dehors/Audela are also working with students at the Liceo Righi [see news Emotions as Actions]. Although it’s the same project, the students’ reaction is very different. At the Cattaneo School, where all the students are male, the attention is focused on technical details concerning the shoots and editing of the video, while at the Liceo Righi, where most of the students participating in the workshop are female, the attention shifts to the emotions aspects of the representation. The differences that are emerging demonstrate how, even with the same guidelines, artistic processes lead to the creation of personal and original works.

Interviews by Eleonora Curatola: