Voyager, a Journey through Time and Water

Voyager a Journey through Time and Water, commissioned by The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo, is a film (2005–2008) of the Italian artist Marco Mazzi. It is a sensory journey with images that shows two parallel and diverse stories that are bound to each other on many levels. The film deals with moods that have no name, abstract and indefinable situations for which there are no enunciations — they can only be alluded to with the typology of a different kind of speech: that of images.

With his memory a man evokes a car trip along a deserted street. The memory of this trip is transformed (in his imagination or in his thoughts) into an ambiguous presentiment of death, or of termination of something. The second situation films a young Japanese woman (performed by the actress Chika Uchihara) staring into space from the roof of a skyscraper.

In this film, the problem that anguishes the two characters is never directly named. The man and woman, immersed in their memories and their visions, yearn with their thoughts but never verbalize their feelings or indicate precisely their desires. The particularity of Voyager is this: for the entire film, Mazzi avoids making clear what the feelings are that activate characters' thoughts through the use of words. The artist prompts our perceptions with the aid of rapid sequences that follow one after the other in an ambiguous atmosphere, suspended and dreamlike.

Voyager premiered in Tokyo, at the Watari Museum, on January 18, 2008. The exhibition was curated by the art critic Koichi Watari (Documenta IX assistant curator, and curator of the Japanese pavilion of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995) and by Japanese renewed contemporary poet and performer Gozo Yoshimasu.

References

• Marco Mazzi, a cura di Gaia Pasi, Edizioni "Gli Ori", Prato (Italy).

External links

• http://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/ea2/ita/080115mazzi_TUFS_riassunto.html
• http://f.hatena.ne.jp/elmikamino/20080227135024
• http://www.arte.go.it/eventi/2008/e_0131.htm