Museum Raum 10
Grazia Toderi: Rosso Babele, 2006
The Italian video artist Grazia Toderi zooms out to wide angle in her works time and again to combine panoramas of vibrant life (of cities, stadiums, theaters etc.) with phenomena of the cosmic and extraterrestrial precisely from there: Thus views from far away suddenly appear oppressively close and get a metaphysical element by means of deliberate auratization. Her video “Rosso Babele“ generates a tower of flickering points of light that cyclically builds up and collapses from myriad city views accumulated one on top of the other. The sonic impact has been taken from recordings from the Iraq War. The dominating red of the video is superimposed like menacing lava masses over the anonymous urban vedutas, making them appear like a modern Hades. In a contemporary version of the “Tower of Babel”, she presents language and communication in a globalized world and—clad in the image of one of the oldest mythical narratives of humankind—she warns of ancient hubris. The delusion of permanent growth potential, which changes to the opposite of an implosion, is revealingly visualized in the flow of both beautiful and menacing images.
Text aus | Text from: Johannes Rauchenberger: Gott hat kein Museum. Religion in der Kunst des beginnenden XXI. Jahrhunderts. | No Museum Has God. Religion in Art in the Early 21st Century. (IKON. Bild+Theologie, hg. von | ed. by Alex Stock und Reinhard Hoeps), Verlag Ferdinand Schoeningh, Paderborn 2015, S. | p. 996-997.