MEDUSA

a VR experience in 2 acts by Sara Tirelli

MEDUSA ACT I 360 4K stereoscopic video, ambisonic sound, color, 10’ 15’’, 2018MEDUSA ACT II 360 4K stereoscopic video, ambisonic sound, color, 8’ 58’’,  2018

Medusa is an experimental 360 short film about the contemporary crisis of Europe’s identity. This immersive experience has an hybrid format that hints at video art, performance art, choreography and sound art. The storytelling style is the result of a critical approach to immersive filmmaking conducted with the freedom to experiment in order to speculate on new cinematic format.
Medusa immerses the viewer in a surreal chains of events: a murdering in a museum, a lady spitting an apple, young men climbing ladders. An old Diva, Miss Europe, inhabits a dark space waiting to open a show that will never happen. A garbled french male voice bursts in time to time, it speaks from an undefined source as it were an interference from the past. Indeed those are audio fragments taken from a conferences about the “ Future of European Civilisation” held in 1956 in Athen by Albert Camus.
The work describes a Europe in crisis and the events that take place in the film consist of a mixture of facts and fiction. Sara Tirelli has used news, social media, EU documents and interviews to portray the EU's identity as well as the prevailing situation for people on the run.The title of the work refers to the Greek myth of being petrified when looking into the eyes of gorgon Medusa. It can also be associated with Theodoré Gericault's art-historical work Medusas Raft (1818-1819). In the painting, shipwreck survivors reveal how people suffer from the poor decisions made by those in power. Medusa's Raft can also be linked to today's images of refugees who risk their lives on their way to Europe, while the inhabitants of Europe witness the events in front of a screen. There is a clear lineage between the painting and contemporary media's images of the refugee situation.

Medusa is the second stage of an artistic research on the consequences that the massive immigrants flows are causing to European stronghold and it questions the regress and loss of memory of a culture. The film project focuses on the contemporary rising of disused ideology that are catching on Europe’s political debates and questions the process that shapes public opinion and shared ideology.

By means of immersive technology, the treatment of Medusa follows a post-truth logic and aims to depict the condition of human being in a hyper-mediated society, where presence and experience aren’t anymore strictly linked to a physical space, and where reality and fiction definitely overlapped.

www.saratirelli.com