[Per la traduzione italiana, clicca qui.]
The Diary of a Young Boat is a kind of interdimensional radio play—sometimes with and sometimes without any actual radios involved. The shape-shifting forms this ongoing series takes reflect its embedded narrative: the fictional aural diary of a pubescent girl who miraculously transforms into a boat.
The installations in this series create a portrait of a self that isn’t defined by a solid mass or bounded by a contour. Instead, what emerges is a representation of the precariously balanced system of perception, memory and imagination that keeps a human being afloat. (See below for links to previous installations and/or performances.)
Since the site-specific installation of Metamorfosi di una barca (2011)—a version of the Diary of a Young Boat, without sound, adapted specifically for the city of Bagnara’s 14th-century castle tower—incremental steps toward the realization of Diario di una giovane barca (Italian translation of The Diary of a Young Boat)as an urban intervention in Bologna have been underway:
- In April 2013, actor Laura Falqui performed a series of readings of Diario di una giovane barca in my painting studio in Bologna.
- Several months later, a “preamble” to a projected three-part urban intervention in Bologna was hosted by Cartoleria 18 Società Cooperativa: in Diario di una giovane barca in tre movimenti (June – July 2013), excerpts of the Diary of a Young Boat were read in Italian in a series of performances by Laura Falqui (as the voice of the Young Boat). The audience followed her from floor to floor where she read excerpts from the Diario in three site-specific installations.
- On September 8, 2013, Ms. Falqui read excerpts from Diario di una giovane barca in a live radio broadcast from Radio Città del Capo during a special presentation at Casa dei Pensieri Libreria for the annual national celebration of Festa dell’Unità in Parco Nord, Bologna.
- Ultimately, Diario di una giovane barca will take the form of an urban intervention in Bologna—groups of 10 or so people will be led from three or four sites within the ancient city, following the course of the city’s now hidden canal network, listening to the entire aural diary of the Young Boat’s metamorphosis in sequence in real time. In this site-specific theater/interdisciplinary art installation, Bologna’s secret and storied past—epitomized in its almost forgotten metamorphosis from a “water city”—will merge with the Young Boat’s story of transformation in unexpected and uncanny ways.
IIn 2009, having completed the text for Diary of a Young Boat, I began exploring the visual components of this piece, using discarded household objects such as mirrors, ladders, umbrellas, ropes and string in floating, multimedia pieces that incorporated the surrounding space. Ultimately, these suspended sculpture/paintings led to the Metamorfosi di una barca (2011), a site-specific installation of sculpture/paintings in the Museo di Castello, an ancient castle tower museum in Bagnara di Romagna, Italy. The tower’s four circular floors and winding staircase provided an unexpectedly apt embodiment of the pubescent girl’s metamorphosis. In Metamorfosi di una barca, using painted mirrors, ropes, pulleys, wires, pebbles and everyday objects, the viewer is led through the 14th-century castle tower in a spatial narrative (without sound). The imposing tower brought an unimagined dimension to the pieces I had been working on in my studio: a kinetic, physical involvement develops with the visual narrative of the metamorphosis of the Young Boat as the viewer arduously climbs from the bottom darkest level up to the airy top floor of the tower.
In May 2018, Metamorphosis, a spatial painting from The Diary series, was installed in Ionian Academy, Corfu, Greece, supported by the US embassy and Ionian University.
THEATER IN THE CLOUD is a forum for exploring new genres in audio plays, internet theater and online literary forms. There is a startling, subversive element in art forms that infiltrate our private spheres—such as radio plays and new internet art forms—or embed themselves unexpectedly in public spaces—such as urban interventions and site-specific theater—impacting our lives in visceral, subliminal ways. Suddenly, in familiar places, portals open, changing the way we see the world around us and ourselves.
The internet allows for groundbreaking explorations of and developments in audio plays. The ambient nature of radio plays makes it a uniquely intimate narrative form—allowing the listener to wander around their personal space, immersed in their own spaces and routines, while enveloped in a guided fiction, mentally projecting the unfolding drama into their kitchen sink or the cracks in their ceiling. And the internet allows radio drama to evolve in countless new directions.
What was the impetus for this project?
At a dinner party long ago, I heard a curious fact: that the majority of documented incidents of poltergeist—or inexplicable occurrences of psychokinesis—occur in the homes of pubescent girls. After researching this, what intrigued me about these reports wasn’t their occult or sensational aspects, but the fact that such a naked challenge to our fundamental assumptions about physical reality and “laws of physics” comes from the unconscious of pubescent girls.
These stories seemed to me perfect allegories for the extraordinary, unsung power of raw female energy, and led me to this project. The heart of “Diary of a Young Boat” is the fictional, aural diary of a 13-year-old girl, who becomes the locus of bizarre occurrences, culminating in her miraculous transformation into a boat. This transformation, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Kafka’s cockroach, isn’t meant to be a science-fiction story, but a metaphor for our deepest yearnings and latent powers. The diary reflects the jumbled chaos of adolescence: alarming bodily changes are interwoven with irreverent descriptions of classrooms, abusive authorities, and the girl’s personal passion for science and the supernatural. Family, teachers, and doctors attribute her bizarre physical mutations to a psychological illness; but really it’s her own brilliant mechanism for self-preservation and escape from the prison of her childhood. “I have a genius for getting sick,” she says, It’s my talent. My gift.”
In the unbridled energy of puberty, indomitable unconscious desires are unleashed: defying consensus reality and the circumscribed limits of the imagination, the young girl transforms into a boat and vanishes, leaving behind the record of her metamorphosis.
