Installation and concept | Alice Padovani
Sound design | The Little Dead

text by Cristina Cellini Antonini , co-founder and artistic director of WE RESTART

Alice Padovani is an extraordinary interpreter of our times, capable of grasping and transforming those signals that indicate profound changes and of returning them to us with the simplicity of an understandable language, combining the word with gesture and matter, so that "her" art becomes “Ours” through the ritual. After two years of pandemic and an international crisis at the door, Alice Padovani asks herself and all of us: “What are you afraid of? ". Few characters in black on a white billboard that have the strength to awaken consciences from the collective torpor. A question that comes suddenly almost in a mystical way and that forces us to look inwards. But what is fear? It is an emotion that unites all of us, it is universal and as the theorist of evolution Charles Darwin wrote in 1872, “fear has always been expressed in a way identical to that of today”.

Fear exists because you are not living with life, you are living in your mind what might happen next. This creates a distorted reality that places us in the perspective of fearing the other and diversity, which triggers prejudices, stereotypes and forms of discrimination. The truth is that fear is very simple: we are all afraid and this makes us equal . From this dialogue with the public and from the synergistic collaboration with the band Le Piccole Morti, the work Eclissi is born. Three movements to black . That is, an immersive installation, where sound accompanies and amplifies the suggestions of the viewer, divided into three movements that give shape to this emotion. Three rooms, three sound movements, and a luminous and cathartic progression from dark to light. As in an eclipse, fear acts by deforming and obscuring our reality, so Alice Padovani forces the viewer to see and listen to fear in order to understand its transitory nature. In the central room, two chairs invite you to listen and meditate, while the two adjacent rooms act as the opposite poles of an eclipse. A room is darkness, emptiness, the censorship of fear; the opposite room is the light, the sharing of fears, united by a red thread from which, like a cloud, words rain down, returned to the lightness of the soul.
Introducing the three rooms, a work that distinguishes Padovani's artistic language, a museum case where a sentence stands out in the sand: “My amulet against fear is time”.
“Being lost in one's imagination, this is the basis of fear. If you are rooted in reality, there is no fear. " Sadhguru

What are you afraid of? is one of the projects selected by Eccom-Idee per la cultura through the Europa Creativa call "DRIS - Co-creating Intercultural Societies: a Focus on Racism and Discrimination" and involves the visual artist Alice Padovani, flanked by the videomaker Ali Beidoun and by musical band The Little Dead.

What are you afraid of? is promoted by the Cultural Heritage Service of the Emilia Romagna Region and carried out in collaboration between the Municipality of Reggio Emilia / Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia | Mondinsieme Foundation | Abreer-Association of Burkinabè of Reggio Emilia | Intercultural Choir of Reggio Emilia APS | AGE-European Youth Association | Association of Ukrainian Volunteers in Italy-ABY | Malian Association Badegna | Gemma-Unimore Museum | House of Cultures of Modena | Valdarnese del Poggio Academy | TEFA Colombia Association ODV of Modena | Silvia Rossi

Free entry