Italy – Cyland Video Archive

Spartina Maritima

Darya Cherkashina — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 19:29:52 +0000

In his project ARCA-DNA, Alessandro Zannier reflects on the concepts of Habitat – Backup – Extinction. The audiovisual installation features soundscapes composed from fragments of the Venetian environment, arranged according to the DNA sequences of an endangered lagoon species: the halophytic saltmarsh plant Spartina maritima, one of the largest living organisms in the world by mass, volume, and area.

The concept of Backup, a natural progression from that of Habitat, is most closely tied to the 2023 concept album Arca (as Ottodix), which also inspired the artist’s interdisciplinary DVRI residency across Venice. In the album, Zannier envisions a vast space ark—its form recalling both Noah’s Ark and the turtle Chelonia mydas—as humanity’s imagined refuge.

This work acts as a black box containing the DNA of a place: habitat backups stored against catastrophe, seed-capsules designed to be sown elsewhere, enabling future generations to recover the deep essence of a lost landscape—its maps, history, artworks, environmental data, species, and archives.

Zannier’s earlier project ENT, linking environmental data between Italy and six continents, began between Venice and New Zealand and concluded in the United States, entering the collection of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York with the support of international curator and architect Alessandro Melis.

He also collaborates with universities and research institutes worldwide, producing artistic and sound-based investigations into complex systems and the interplay between nature and society. Under his musical alias Ottodix, he has released 8 concept albums, 2 collections, and a biography, a pioneering project in Italian electro-alternative music. Today Ottodix concerts bring science, philosophy, and environmentalism into cultural and museum spaces.

A.Zannier_SpartinaMaritima2DNA2023

A.Zannier_SpartinaMaritima3DNA2023

A.Zannier_SpartinaMaritima4DNA2023

A.Zannier_SpartinaMaritimaDNA2023

The post Spartina Maritima appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

Skinned

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:28:15 +0000

A Dadaist collage that plays on the concept of identity, elaborated through impossible selfies taken by the protagonists of famous masterpieces in the history of portraiture and self-portrait.

These portraits come alive, piercing the boundaries of their temporal and cultural definition. Then suddenly they grab a smartphone, they call and maybe wait, the eternal expectation of those who meet a call center.

Contemporary everyday life insinuates itself, alienating and alienated, within the lyrical, utopian, and idealized world of a portrait.

What do you hide under your skin, flayed by the toxic radiation of mobile phones? What would Leonardo da Vinci or Andy Warhol have done with this evil device?

image_skinned_3

image_skinned_2

image_skinned_q

The post Skinned appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

loving

Darya Cherkashina — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 18:39:25 +0000

Video “loving” (single channel, ambient sound, color, real time, loop 26 min 52 sec), environment with desk, chair, lamp, stationery with letterhead and pen, participative act of the visitors writing a love-letter and depositing it in the drawer, 2016/2024.

loving. It is slow, it seems long. It is short.

On a special day, I was sitting on my ter- race in Rome, when I noticed the half-moon in a very rare vertical position. It was on the 9th September, by chance my grandmother’s birthday, born in 1900. The sky was still bright, voices of people on the streets suggested a serene late-summer evening.

My mood was that of a woman with a broken heart, while reflecting about her own, lost love.

I was here, that strange half part of the moon was there. I observed the moon’s slow crossing over what seemed to me “my sky”. I saw myself as a little individual in a little place, at a little time, living a little life but with a big sentiment, while I was related to such greater dimensions of distance and time. I started to think about love and time.

In my eyes, that image was dramatically beautiful. It was that, what Love meant for me in this very moment: It is slow, it seems long. It is short. The artistic work, which came out from that experience is the video, I called loving.

Regina Hubner loving

IMG_7296

IMG_6ADA87652BF3-135 2

20241127-IMG_2462-FullSize

The post loving appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

Pandemic Era

Darya Cherkashina — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 10:55:35 +0000

Time has become chaotic in quarantine, sometimes terribly fast, sometimes desperately slow. Time that is both full and empty: human relationships, emergency, sorrow, loneliness, uncertainty, neuroses, restrictions and loss. Sometimes I feel like an animal that will gnaw its leg off to escape from a trap. We are in, we are out; it’s better, it’s worse; it’s death, it’s rebirth. We don’t know, we don’t really know anything. We have gone back to being vulnerable, everything is still confused, everything still to be explored. I no longer recognize myself; I am different from the way I was here, and I am no longer how I was before. Who knows if I will be like that again. Maybe it was just an intermission or maybe I still have to figure out who I have become in this new Pandemic Era.

Снимок экрана 2024-02-19 в 14.55.54

Снимок экрана 2024-02-19 в 14.54.59

Снимок экрана 2024-02-19 в 14.55.13

Снимок экрана 2024-02-19 в 14.55.21

The post Pandemic Era appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

Public Space

Darya Cherkashina — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:55:03 +0000

Modern medicine completely changed the process and experience of pregnancy/birth. Ultrasound made it routine to see watch inner space. Thanks to modern technology, a sacred and intimate place ‐ a womb ‐ is available for observation.

public_space_marcantonio_lunardi_4

The post Public Space appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

Liszt

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:05:55 +0000

It is the beginning of the 20th century and three children are posing for a family photo. The children are young pioneers in a colony of Christian immigrants in Jerusalem. The subsequent intervention of the photographer has added to their bewildered faces the false colors of the photos of the period; a combination of chromatic shades with the odor of cookies and hot milk, porcelain dolls, long sea journeys, dusty old books, and an artificial “innocence”. This is the point of departure for a digital transformation in which the lower part of my face replaces that of the children, in a reversal of time and meaning crystalized in a non-time and non-meaning, as a different kind of story comes to light which, superimposing itself on the peculiar circumstances in which the photo was taken, looks for its metaphorical significance. In this way the three children become three human archetypes imprisoned in the eternal pillory of a family photo.

It is a forced communion that translates into reciprocal impatience and an increasing verbal violence that superimposes itself on the words, preventing any kind of interaction. The sense of incommunicableness is obtained by juxtaposing fragments of phrases found on the Internet, in a mash-up that unravels into a contemporary senseless dialogue that reveals how a word not listened to is, consciously or not, violence in its pure state. And therefore the universe concealed in this photo, the epic of human dreams and illusions, in the family album of the search for a lost innocence by these ancient pioneers, is translated into a form of violence that throughout history has brought extreme consequences. When there is only the word, one’s own, the mouth becomes a weapon. Nonetheless, the invitation to listen is recuperated in the end, in a sort of message of hope that I consign to the world through these three unknowing ancestors.

Francesca Fini LISZT1

Francesca Fini LISZT2

Francesca Fini LISZT3

Francesca Fini LISZT4

The post Liszt appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.