Giuliana Racco, Mezomaro 2016.

Giuliana Racco (Canada, 1976), Mezomaro, 2016, 7’7”.

The play of source materials in the black and white video Mezomaro, whose title comes from the word meaning Mediterranean in Esperanto, combines animated chalk drawings, photographs, newspaper clippings and archival images to explore ideas of mobility and citizenship, poetically expanding current global situations to the history of people and geography over time.

Drawing on Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516) –a work which contains both a proto-science-fiction and a battle scene on Lampedusa, where Racco’s photographs were taken–, Mezomaro references our contemporary context by shedding light on how a miniscule island located between continents is connected to a global crisis situation via the multitude of people from different areas of the world attempting to reach its shores. Here, the island, which could be one of many, receives wide media attention as a portal of a journey to other places, resulting in an invisible presence of people who are swept away by military operations almost before they touch land.