ELLIPSIS

So, we are watching this Antonioni movie, I tre volti. She looks like my mother, as young. We’re in an auditorium. There’s a cat on the floor.

It’s her lips, the lower one is ”dripping.” She’s calling her mother, she asks her to come. She’s alone, perdida en el mundo, sentimentalismo puro (a mí, no funcione). She asks her to come. In German. She’s a young German girl in Italy trying her way as an extra, as an actress.

The quality is bad, there are no subtitles. But how she looks like my mother.

”Why are you suspicious, I have the impression that you are very cold? Why do you want to be an actress?”

After the film he talks about participation, about a moment of fascination between a public and 3 melodrama actors. They believe, the public. Like my sister. We once went to a theatre to see Medea. When Medea killed her to kids, raised the theatre knife and stabbed them, my sister screamed. She believed. Her husband, a film director, always says she’s the best public ever, because she really believes. Yesterday she had her second kid and she never watches the tele at night in order to sleep undisturbed by the reality the tele brings her.
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Neorealismus – that the actors participate. The moment where the actors believe, act what they are acting – or the other way around.

The gesture of pointing to the screen and saying to his wife; ”look, look, look what’s gonna happen!” Cada vez – otra vez, it happens again for the first time.

We don’t just perceive fictional worlds from without, we live with them, sharing their sorrows and joys. We are perfectly aware they’re fictional, but from within they look real.
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Now the cat is cuddling his leg.
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El participación en la obra del arte es constitutiva. The artwork exists in this tension, in this difficulty of being within these two, inside and outside, real and fictional, of being constitutive.
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Ambigüedad con el arte
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(Inspired by the lecture “Quasi. Antonioni y la participación en el arte” by Alex Düttmann at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago)