Festival Coming from the Sea! 46th Edition

In Japan it is said that the gods grant a wish to anyone who makes 1,000 origami cranes. Of this tradition, called senbazuru, I love the intimate ritual, the discipline it implies and the meditative repetitiveness it generates. While making my 1000 origami, perhaps because of the particular historical period we are living in, more than the crane I could not help but think of another animal, also linked to myth: the phoenix. Birth from one's own ashes, but also death in one's own nest and return in a new form... these are just some of the symbolic elements that thefirebird carries. So after shaping 1,000 origami birds, I realized that they could be little phoenixes. Why not? No one has ever seen a phoenix! That's why I called them "orifea" (from "phoenix origami"). 

The orphae became the starting point for a video project, divided into two parts: Oriphoea zero is a short film with flesh-and-blood actors and stop-motion animated figures; for I cacciatori di orifee, on the other hand, the idea is that of a "poetic documentary" to narrate, as a series of images without a real narrative thread, intimate creative gestures that I witnessed during this 2020/21. The intent is to want to find seeds of beauty amidst the welter of sensations that characterized such a unique and unprecedented condition as mandatory confinement . The orifee are no longer animated, but they are ever present both as physical objects and, more importantly, as metaphor.