The eighth edition of Over The Real – International Festival of Video and Multimedia Art – celebrates the 60th anniversary of the birth of video art through the exhibition of a series of installations that interpret in free form and through different languages, the evolutionary path of multimedia arts from 1963 to today.
The installation “Gli Ascoltatori” (The Listeners), created by Luca Serasini and Marco Ricci Del Mastro, part of the project The Marconisti, is a contemporary model of how the various artistic disciplines transform themselves into a unicum able to represent both a historical tribute and a perspective vision of the present and future. The richness of Marco Ricci Del Mastro, on the occasion of the Festival can’t fail to remember the first experiments of Nam June Paik and Wolf Wostell gave life to the electronic arts, but we must point out that they take a further step back in time bringing us back to the great scientific discoveries of Guglielmo Marconi. The sound, born from “row radio signals and Morse code”, spreads inside the evocative space of the auditorium of the Agorà civic library in Lucca, where the scene dominates the center, in perfect dialogue with the characteristics of the former place of worship, a round table on which Luca Serasini depicts a “Listener” in front of three stairs extending upwards. A look accompanied by sounds tries to steal and interchange messages with the ether in search of an unprecedented conceptual form of one’s self. Considering that in traditional metaphors there are two iconic paths to choose, “Gli Ascoltatori” overcomes this preconception by proposing three scales, both as three possible answers, but above all as an additional alternative to overcoming certain social and psychological barriers of our daily lives. An ascent towards the rediscovery of one’s own self finally opens a new collective harmony.
“Gli Ascoltatori” is definitely an introspective meditation, interaction, and renewed energy.

text by Maurizio Marco Tozzi