“The narrative influences the landscape, fictions emerge from the reality we observe. Represented environment vibrates, moved by electricity, whispering news from television screens, changing tides and weather, coordinated animal movements. A holiday house somewhere on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, functions as a starting point for magical and affective explorations. ‘The House is far away from any village and has its own atmosphere, making it a perfect place for an emergence of a microcosmʼ writes Ingarden in the incipit story. Each of nine short-stories introduces the viewer to a different aspect of the house. The imaginative geographical and metaphorical wonders of Italo Calvinoʼs _(1972) come to mind, interlacing historical and fictional facts, real and invented coordinates. The videos full of veiled symbolism and sculptural references, depict the house as a body in all its different parts. Eyes, to see the multiple alchemical transformations, ears to listen to the secrets that the house tells. The sculptural works function instead as receptive screens: absorbing and transmitting. Reminiscent of solar panels, surveillance radars or satellite antennas, they are turned towards each other, perhaps the viewer. The panels, held by red-lacquered metal poles, are filled with acoustic foam covered with butterflies crystallized in salt. The house is moved by nature, the news, technology, the surrounding sea waves, the weather, the cycle of day and night, the wind, and a variety of distant voices it carries. All these little things make the house, its temporal layers of accumulation, the mixture of aspirational design and affordable comfort, constantly vibrate as an organ. The house is alive, a responsive system connecting with the natural world and its ancient myths. A sense of supernatural dramaturgy pervades, uncanny scenes and disorienting moments. Time loops and collapses, spiralling. We wonder if the House is the earth, a far-away planet or maybe us.”

-Attilia Fattori Franchini