A POSSIBLE PATH

2009

dvd-video, color, 2 channel sound
5 min 44 sec

Moving towards the peak, the crunching of the footsteps on the snow is paired with the increasing heaviness of the breath. The obsessive sequence of steps, one after the other without ever stopping, sparks the need for an end, for a point of arrival – which, when it comes, reveals itself as an inevitable new point of departure.

 

A rhythm – the one which is necessary for breathing – at its limit.
Footprints in the snow, overstrained but never-ending.
A sick light that doesn't seem to diminish.
And a shadow that marks the screen and the passing of time.
There is no dialogue or monologue, there is no soundtrack or audio effects. Only breath.
No development or narrative growth, but repetition and accumulation of a gesture equal to itself: a quick pace that kicks away the snow, an obsessive breathing.
We do not know what the destination of this walk is, or if we are witnessing those very steps fiercely going against themselves. The only thing that is certain is that the destination is constructed during the walk and that it is written and rewritten, confirming itself with the progress and unforeseen events of the journey. In Four Quartets T.S. Eliot – with an eye to Juan de la Cruz, master of mystical ascents, and to the monochromes of Dante's Purgatory – wrote: "In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not". The destination is that which we are not and it is reached by crossing through a diversity that at the end leads back to ourselves. Such a multiplication of levels and points of view is mirrored in the structure of A Possible Path: the glance of the camera captures a zenithal vision; the sight of the spectator in front of the screen follows the steps from bottom to top; and finally the narrative glance of the author (in the text that accompanies the video, and in the context in which this was initially originated and presented) tells of an ascent.
On 27 October 2007 Paolo Inverni undertook a walk from Crissolo to Pian del Re to reach the source of the River Po and to make a series of audio recordings to use in Paths, a project whose idea came from a re-visitation and re-appropriation of Inverni's chosen locations through sound and memory. "The sun was hot but the air freezing. It had just snowed. I hadn't seen neither a person nor a footprint all day". Isolation and difficult weather conditions: even the context tends to break the words and visual elements down to their basic forms, exposing a bare structure in movement: that of the steps in the snow and the breath becoming more and more difficult. The sequence of A Possible Path resumes the walk: not the destination, but instead five minutes and forty-four seconds of steps and breaths in their cyclic chase. What remains is the mental loop of this rhythm, the grip of this pace.
The recording becomes a prosthetic element that stretches and perpetuates body and breath, and transfigures any narrative and temporal conventions. The space of the screen and the time of the video appear as empty and resonating vessels.
Alain Badiou wrote that speaking about moving images always means speaking about a memory. "Cinema treats the ties that bind together movement and rest, forgetting and reminiscence, the impure. Not so much what we know as what we can know. To speak of a film is less to speak of the resources of thought than of its possibilities".
The personal memory of the event, based on repeated patterns, battles with another mode of recalling / recording, no longer based on memory but on a fixed support that records and reproduces. The collision of the two modes creates unforeseen narratives, that take form in a vital and poetic work. After all – as Bachelard showed, and before him Mallarmé – life and poetry are based on breath. That which is remembered and that which is recorded are simultaneously past and present. A Possible Path highlights the hinge between these two dimensions, between what is fixed and what is possible, between recording and act, between thought and physical gesture.

Daniela Cascella, 2009