Marco Vitale
Ed io ti chiamo ti chiamo ti chiamo sirena
01.13.2021 – 02.07.2021
Marco Vitale
Ed io ti chiamo ti chiamo ti chiamo sirena
01.13.2021 – 02.07.2021
You can see the one who sees, but you can’t hear the one who’s listening
Marcel Duchamp
In the neurosciences dyslexia has been the focus of heated debates that in the last years have generated several schools of thought. Some consider this problem as a phonological illness, others see it as an ailment affecting the visual realm. What we know from science is that our brain was not born to read, and that alphabetic reading considerably spread only in the last century. Therefore, from the point of view of physiology, when we read we ask our brain to make an extraordinary effort. The brain did not genetically evolute for reading and at times can make mistakes. Dyslexia is thus interpreted by some as a multi-factor ailment affecting attention – in which ailment is considered as a significant variation of skills or behaviours from the average standard – linked to a non-natural act, which is rather modern and connected to the so-called “sustained attention”, i.e. the concentration time-span on a specific subject. From the visual viewpoint, on the other hand, dyslexia is basically a deficit of the magnocellular dorsal pathway (the one starting from the retina and reaching the cerebral cortex), which allows the perception of movement and the right localization of objects in the space. The dyslexic subject sees a sort of movement on the written page, signs that exchange place and move across the page, and the so-called “mirror mistakes”, particularly evident with the inversion of the letters “b” and “d”.
The video artwork by Marco Vitale explores this visual process and invites us to overcome the idea of prejudice, going beyond the sense of mistake. Ed io ti chiamo ti chiamo ti chiamo sirena [And I call you I call you I call you mermaid] includes a reading recorded by phone and a videotext with such a narrow line spacing that the author’s words almost become a texture. Instead of correcting the dyslexic subject’s reading, but rather setting it free, the work calls for an increased consideration of what’s missing, and it allows us to perceive what is taken away, what is far from us, what is invisible. The oral character of the dyslexic reading becomes the favourite way to make explicit the most unexpected side of human subjectivity, such as the variable that generates error. In the lateral and intermittent movement that characterises the dyslexic eye, the artist locates a sort of archaeology of vision which precedes the physiological education of the ocular bulb. The artist appropriates this paradigm and imitates its scheme in this formal synthesis of his artistic practice: “A biological witness to the eye. A biological coincidence, to be more precise, the one between writing and reading, the latter correcting the former by wandering upon it. I contend that this artwork is a scientific test in which the hypothesis is more relevant than the results”.