Venice Biennale (Valerio Berruti)

Another video work I found very engaging was an animation installation entitled La Figlia di Isacco by Valerio Berruti. Here's a page from his website that shows some stills of his process. When I first came into the large room that held this among many other works, I was captivated by the music I heard and wanted to know which piece it "belonged" to. When I walked around the box, which was about ten or twelve feet high//wide, I enjoyed the drawings and knowing that the music was related to them, but when I turned the last corner and saw the animation going on inside, I stopped. I was simply mesmerized watching this little girl turn in her highchair, and couldn't help but identify with her, feel it was me turning in the chair. The experience immediately recalled memories of being a child and feeling a fear of being alone, as well as feelings of helplessness and dependence--what it felt like to be put somewhere and not be able to get down or move from it until someone comes to help you. I was struck by the feeling of smallness and vulnerability. I didn't understand the title when I was there, but it translates as The Daughter of Isaac. Because I have never known the bible very well, so when I came home I looked up the story of Isaac, who it turns out did not have a daughter. The fictional nature of this adds another layer to the piece because the girl becomes the one who was forgotten, who was never spoken of, not written about or remembered and this adds to her loneliness and sense of abandonment.

Formally, Berruti took a simple idea and carried it out with only a red crayon, white gesso, and the brown paper in just a few spare contours and painted white background to make what turns out to be a quite-complex animation of a little girl's movements. I found myself thinking of how many hundreds of drawings it must have taken to make this, which is even clearer from the stills on his website. The small shifts between his drawn frames contributes to the child-like quality, and the limited materials speak to many children's books (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Swimmy, or books by Eric Carl, for example). If this had just been a video of a girl moving around in a chair with the same music it would not have had the same effect. The translation into drawings is essential here because it focuses our attention on her movement, which Berruti captured with a lot of truth--they are the movements of any curious child who is sitting in one place for a while, generalizing her as "a girl" rather than being so specific as belonging only to the girl who he watched to do them. The animation would have also not been the same without the music behind it. The music is nostalgic, repetative, meditative, quiet, slow, and never quite feels complete, which brings on a sense that we must stay here until there is more resolution. The simplicity//complexity of the animation coupled with the repetitive, leading music just held me. Standing there, I realized that I didn't mind feeling small, that Berruti had made it okay to feel small and vulnerable. This is an amazing thing these days; very few artists seem to want to help their audiences be okay with their insecurities and smallness, but Berruti has done just that here. I could have stayed and watched forever, and I noticed that almost everyone who came around the corner had a similar reaction--we were simply captivated.