ManCrazyFastLife
The artwork is a critique of contemporary capitalist and consumerist society, and the alienation and desolation it produces. Using digital compositing, sped-up archival footage – Godfrey Reggio’s "Our Crazy Life" (1982) – is overlaid with slowed-down contemporary shots, creating a temporal contrast that invites reflection on the unstoppable race toward consumption since the 1980s, while revealing the progressive separation of urban humanity from its biological nature.
The sound design, an integral part of the concept, mixes Avola’s track "Cave Rave" with a sonic texture of mechanical noises and distorted voices, emphasizing the unease and despair of this existence.
Through a reference to Plato’s myth of the cave, the work presents our reality as an illusion from which emerges the monstrous figure of a self-estranged man, enslaved by a purely sensory reality and forced to uphold the very system that destroys him. The viewer, a modern prisoner of the cave, is prompted to break their own chains and become the one who, leaving the cave, sees the sunlight beyond their own shadow, questioning everything around them.
The final metaphor of the cigarette embodies this condition: we are consuming and burning our lives quickly and unhealthily, leaving only traces of smoke and ash. We are that cigarette, reflected in a mirror that shows the semblance of a reality we refuse to acknowledge out of mere convenience.
Production, Filming, Editing, Sound Design - Beatrice Severin
Performer, Styling - Umberto Favero