Airplanes fly through the sky, they come and go from the sea to the earth, the summer afternoon stillness is broken by a rumble. Maybe this is a tragic event. Or, it is a war, and yet it is a simulated one, like it happens on the videogames screens. With saturated colours and rapid movements, the video is titled: Wargames (2004), Actually, they are banal fire-fighting planes in operation. With her video camera, Simonetta Fadda follows their way, for later cutting and assembling the shot images into four channels. The play station effect is also assured by the sound, which is live recorded but transformed in quick rhythm. Beginning from 1992, Simonetta Fadda works at her television reports, using the video camera for shooting marginal or not much visible events in the urban territory. The term alludes to the typology of the journalistic report. A good report answers to clearness, synthesis and exhaustiveness criteria. Even if its reason for existence lies in the ambition of respecting the substantial truth of the facts, Simonetta Fadda’s television report, on the other hand, adheres to the substantial truth of the language of the adopted medium. Fadda eliminates all fictional or visually metaphoric formulas, standing with her video camera in front of the real without adding in it any other meaning, with the neutral approach of those who avoid strong directions. Instead, she works on the essential components of the video language: sound, colour, density and resolution of the images. One of her
first television reports,Genova ora zero (1993) is as misleading as Wargames. It shows a chaotic and confused night, with shots and cries. !t looks like a war, but it isn’t, it is instead a celebration night, it is 1992-93 Sylvester Eve in Genoa. The bombing is fictitious: it is just the celebrative fireworks. The celebrations of the Sylvester Eve are transformed into an hypothetical war, with a clear allusion to the opposite process, triggered by the CNN's reports of the Baghdad's bombing during the First Gulf War, just finished at the time. Frayed and trembling, Fadda’s images are far away from the sharpness of television standards. They are low-resolution images. From 1992 to 2001, the artist shoots on hi8 tape and cuts on VHS tape, working on the videotape by distorting the audio materials and enhancing the fluidity of colours, for finally shooting again the assembled images, by placing her video camera in front of the monitor. So, every copy is made in a handicraft way and is different from the others, depending from the differently inserted audio and video data. By 2001, the artist's use of digital technology doesn’t change her conceptual approach, but it allows her more freedom and fluidity, both in shooting and cutting. Simonetta Fadda works on the “live broadcast” idea, exploiting the video camera ability of capturing the instant as it is. But it is a low-resolution, “live broadcasted” image, it is out-of-focus and dirty. By making use of low resolution’s lack of sharpness and by overtly manipulating the audio and video signals, the artist causes the video language to clearly reveal itself and show how much any reproduction of the real pass necessarily through its filter and, therefore, how specious exactness and objectivity are. Low resolution is functional for pointing out the inconsistency of the concept of high resolution, as perfect precision and exact copy of the real, whereas precision is, instead, "a characteristic of the image, not of what is reproduced’ for saying it with the artist's words. Unveiling the assumed objectivity of the television report, Simonetta Fadda again attests to the words of Marshall McLuhan, that television is language and any linguistic choice is aware and, therefore, potentially ideological. The origins of video art and some of the developments of the medium during the Sixties and the Seventies, are the theoretical cues which substantiate Simonetta Fadda's approach to video. On one hand, she recuperates the heritage of the analytical and meta-linguistic vision of artists like Nam June Paik. The deconstruction of the video language, by working on the electronic signal and on the inner possibilities of the medium—with the consequent production of images compositions, rather than real stories—, is one of her starting points in her choice of low resolution as a standard, along with the consideration of imperfection as an expressive, as well as a critical possibility. On the other hand, there is the alternative information movement and everything involved by a political and social use of the video medium, from video activism-born with the diffusion of portable anc user-friendly video recorders-, to the low-resolution standard for propagating the theoretical and political importance of the power of live-capturing the events’ and life's flux-with the assumption of getting more truth. So, for staying in Italy, Anna (1972-1975) by Alberto Grifi, which shows to what
the visual grammar of low resolution: what we see is what it is, transfigured into image. By means of video, Simonetta Fadda gives visibility to the individual and common rituals of the territory's social use, from Genova Pissing (1993)-where the video camera watches a corner in the street, turned into public urinal-, to Savona Ore Diciotto (1993)-which captures the small town’s tradition of the daily Memorial Celebration, between private memory and public rhetoric-, to Tecnoriti (Videoarte and Telefonite, 1998)-which ridicules the maniacal abuse of mobiles and video or photo cameras-always and everywhere-, to Peints de vue (2001)-on the green Corsican landscape, everywhere charged by the signs of tension of the nationalist graffiti. Between the forms of common life and the urban rituals, Simonetta Fadda unveils, by means of video, the texture of the common attitudes, as an expression of hierarchies of values, which are inherentiin the social structure. Her sociological care is always in relation with the problems involved by such questions.
Wargames (2004) is one of the two video and light box installations, which constitute the exhibition Reality Show (Care of, Milano, 2005). The other one is Stargate (2003). Although the cityscape is always the subject of these “live broadcast” reports (the fire-fighting planes on Savona, in one case; the industrial remains near the shore, in the other), compared to her television reports, these images get a level of abstraction that wasn’t much perceived, before. Near to painting, these images are a beating body of visual and sound incitements, saturated colours, trembling pixels on the screen surface, like it was in Seurat’'s painting, with its vibrating light, as McLuhan reminds as regards the audience perception of the television mosaic. Simonetta Fadda places again her video camera in front to the events with no comment, but the reality acquiring body on the screen is more and more wrong footing and unrecognizable, as if it were given back by a false mirror. To the quick, rapid time of Wargames corresponds the slow time of Stargate. If in the first case there is a live-broadcasted report, subjected to such a medium manipulation to be deceptive (the war that there isn’t), in the second, it is something other what is happening. Stargate is a wharf on the sea, a gate on the nothingness, a sign forbidding the way forward, where there is just the water. The video camera makes only one movement, a zooming, which slowly enlarges our visual field. The final image reveals the remains of an ex industrial building, no more in use, next to the shore. The sea’s dull and monotone'sound sharpens the sense of suspended time. About photography, Walter Benjamin speaks of optical unconscious, of a “nature which speaks to
the photo camera, ... (which is) different from that which speaks to the eye; especially different in this: that instead of a space consciously elaborated by men, there is a space unconsciously elaborated” Again on photography, Susan Sontag reminds that Balzac, while talking with Nadar, suggested the image of a body composed of an infinite series of “ghostly images; which each photo release would have caught, or rather consumed. The image of Stargate is like a veil, it is a double as to the real; also its time is a double, Nothing is happening in the reality and the duration of the video is just the time spent by the video camera for a long slow motion zooming. The video's time is the time performed by the video camera and given back by the monitor, it is the time of the “machine? like It was in the video installations the artist produced from 1984 to 1989, where the television sets and close-circuit monitors not only were indicative of the medium self-referential quality, but they also made perceivable the technological device's expanded time, on the way of Bruce Nauman’s first experiments on feed back.
