La distanza di sicurezza (2021, HD Video, 6'03'')
Language: English
A poetical digital story by Tina Bikic
Credits
Filmed, Written, Directed, Narrated, Edited by Tina Bikic
Cast
In the role of the narrator's double
Luna Paese, Carisa Bledsoe - movers
Music
Cold Summer Landscape by Blear Moon
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Bl…
Music
Windswept by Xylo-Ziko
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Xy…
Producer
Mediagrammi e.V.
Space
Filmed at: Villa Emaldi, Studio Minima Somatica, Faenza, Italy
.
Co-founded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
DanceMeUP 607384-CREA-1-2019-1-IT-CULT-COOP1.
LA DISTANZA DI SICUREZZA
ABOUT
About
"La distanza di sicurezza" is a poetic digital narrative that addresses the profound consequences of isolation and loneliness during the Covid-19 period. It explores the nuanced differences between social and physical distancing and encourages viewers to consider how these forms of distancing shape our relationships with others and with ourselves. By embracing uncertainty as the only constant, the project challenges boundaries and explores loneliness. It celebrates freedom as essential to creative vision and questions the limits of social interaction and physical space. Through a fusion of visual and textual narratives, "La distanza di sicurezza" unfolds as an artist's dream of becoming a bird - an embodiment of freedom and unrestricted movement amidst lockdown.
Methods
La distanza di sicurezza (Safe Distance) was filmed during my artistic residency in Italy, at the time of the Covid-19 lockdown. The work began with a simple yet unsettling phrase that echoed throughout public space: Please keep social distance. Safety first. These words, originally meant for protection, revealed a contradiction: to be “safe” meant to be apart. I was fascinated by this new language of separation, by how a two-metre line could define our entire relationship to the world and to one another.
The film follows two figures, two emotional states of the self, shaped through voice and movement. One wanders through empty natural landscapes, trying to find herself in solitude. The other, confined within an interior space, resists through restless gestures, confronting isolation as an unbearable limit of absence. Architecture, fences, and fragments of the urban landscape appear as visual metaphors of separation, while the recurring announcements Please keep your distance, two metres, be smart become a soundscape of alienation.
The editing process became a way of merging fragments of reality and imagination. I used rhythm, repetition, and pauses to express the tension between control and desire, between natural landscape and deserted city. Images of fences, religious symbols, and graffiti form three architectural motifs that merge into one in the final absence. These visual elements, in their rhythmic repetition, act as images arising from imagination, alternating in moments of deep solitude and pointing to an unbearable tension that tests the limits of reason.
Reflection
The results of the exploration of spatial relations are often a conscious presentation of human commitment to articulate the dialogue between one’s inner and external landscape, which the former references and through which it establishes itself. The culmination unfolds at the end of the work, through montage and poetic narration in the form of a bird, where voice and image finally unite. Art, as a process of making, appears as an act of imagining the impossible, imagination as a form of resistance in times of forced acceptance of reality. Imagination remains the only meaningful negotiation with uncertainty.
Screenings
2022 Venus in the Theatre, Screening and Installation, Forte Marghera, Venice, Italy
2021 Artist in Residence, Villa Emaldi, Faenza, Italy
2.5 Poetics of space: Constructing imaginary worlds on the screen
2.7 Spaces as narrative agents
3.3 Courage to the author: Solitude as precondition
3.5 Writing and rewriting of emotional landscapes
Come on, show up, show up in any of those places
where you can still feel something.
-EXCERPT, LA DISTANZA DI SICUREZZA
La Distanza di Sicurezza
Written and Narrated by Tina Bikic
The silence steams the sky
so unwillingly
it is hard to breath
under the pressure of today
I face today’s uncertainty.
