Good Morning, Captain



         
   
   









A horizon, a scene, a story.
The experience is a container of visions.
Michael Rotondi faces the collective memory subject giving new life to an experience lived many years ago.
“Good mornig, captain” the title of a famous song of a post-rock group, is proposed as a scenario made by spectacular fragments; an installation that interferes the space in order to share an inner landscape.
Here the artist refers to a tragic accident between a tanker and a ferry offshore the port of Livorno: the “Disaster of the Moby Prince,” in 1991, to which he witnessed when he was very young.
When we beat up, our parents ignored us for hours without intervening. Maybe because we wanted to seem hard ones and we did not want to ask for help, while they expected just that.
Once I beat a boy who would have become a big of the US Navy. We beat up from 8.30 in the morning until after sunset. Nobody stopped us even though we were clearly visible from the meadow in front of his house, under two giant pepper trees, from which the sparrows shat on our head.
It was a vicious beating to death. He was bigger, a bit ‘older and heavier than me, but I was unleashed. We stopped for a mutual agreement. I do not know how it is, you have to experience it to understand, but after eight or nine hours a strange sense of brotherhood rises.
The next day I was just an hematoma. My lips were too swollen to allow me to speak and any movement I did, caused me pain. I was lying on the bed waiting for death when my mother came in with the shirt I worn during the beating. She lifted it up to my face and said “Look, it’s all stained with blood! Blood, understand? ”
“I’m sorry”.
“It will never be cleaner! Never again!”.
“He stained it!”
“No matter! This is blood! The blood stains don’t come off!”
What keeps the memory and what remains in the visual ropes, is theview that the artist presents in this installation.
Slumped sails, fragments of victories and hand clothes.
The remains of a collision and the remains of the collective elaboration of a memory.




foto by Filippo Armellin