In a day and age when front lines, walls and rows of refugees literally mark out the ‘own’ territory, and radical expression is part and parcel of everyday discourse, Dias throws out a line to connection and context.
Cláudia and Luca have constructed a visual narrative, using a line to tell the story of a ten-year-old boy, whose grandparents were expelled from Palestine and then from Lebanon, who travels from Syria to Italy. In parallel, they have created a sound narrative, with the noises of this escape. All of this, including Cláudia and Luca’s bodies, is non-verbal, precisely to avoid preconceived ideas. And the text, rather than coming from the mouths of the actors, which would create a false sense of identification with refugees, is projected on the set, in order to underline the distance that separates actors and refugees.
„Like many others of my generation, as I child I was fascinated by Vasco Granja’s TV show, enchanted by the worlds he created with plasticine, cardboard, or a single line. Thirty-some years later, I evoke that world, namely the work of Osvaldo Cavandoli, for this second installment of the Seven Years Seven Pieces project.
Knowing that a line is the shortest distance between two points, Luca Bellezze and I have chosen this as the starting point for our live cartoon, made with a piece of string. Frame by frame, we build a visual and aural narrative that portrays, in a synthetic fashion, particular aspects of contemporary reality.
At a time when dividing lines, borders, barriers, front lines of conflict, queues and the drama of refugees standing in line to be identified, lines demarcating national waters, and the hard lines of the radical factions of political and religious organizations are the order of the day, we intend to work on a unifying line, able to hold together things that are separate.” - Cláudia Dias
In Portugese, in Hungarian and in English
