Metamorfosi is a piece of theatre-music for actress, live electronics, live video created as a unique event for the presentation of the National Audiovisual Museum in its location at the Palazzo della civiltà italiana in Rome EUR. The stagecraft interventions are made up of immaterial elements – light, projection, sound: nothing is added to the structure of the place.
Metamorphosis is part of a path of technological spectacle that already in the sixteenth century found its first presentations thanks to those who were able to create with optical and acoustic instruments shapes and representations of real and imaginary worlds. From the camera obscura, through the magic lantern to the cinema, there is now a further development that expands the mechanical visual magic into the digital world of the 21st century. Here, however, video is used exclusively in the video projection created live to define in this way a very particular “live cinema” that looks at – and stands as a modern-day development of – pre-cinema.
The same digital technology also allows the creation of “acoustic environments”. Soundscapes that surround the audience with voices and sounds in continuous movement, placing the spectator at the center of a listening world where reality and fiction are deeply intertwined. It is a work on space – thanks to the use of visual perception – and on time through the dramaturgical use of sound. At the same time and inevitably on memory and history.