La video-installazione Middlemen realizzata dall'artista olandese Aernout Mik accompagna tutto il festival. Ambientata in una Borsa devastata è uno scavo nei codici dei comportamenti umani e nell'assurdità di norme e convenzioni. L'opera di Mik, a cavallo tra performance, scultura e video, richiede una partecipazione fisica, una penetrazione nello spazio costruito. Spazio ed immagini in movimento determinano un sistema integrato dove lo spettatore è attratto pur rimanendo sostanzialmente estraneo all’evento che si sviluppa senza un preciso ordine narrativo. La mancanza di audio crea un effetto di particolare dissonanza e confusione. Non è dunque la narrazione al centro del lavoro di Mik, ma la presentazione di una situazione ambigua che coinvolge lo spettatore per l’illogico realismo e per la prossimità in uno spazio architettonico inclusivo.

Middlemen (2001)
prima nazionale - video-installazione
courtesy  carlier | gebauer

The video installation Middlemen by the Dutch artist Aernout Mik opens a dialogue between the work and the exhibition space, between fiction and reality. The ambivalence of reality is a recurrent theme in Mik’s video works. The architectural order of the Stock Market and the uniform social codes are merely an apparent order, one that is  exposed and taken apart by the chaos at the end of a day at the stock  market and by the neurotic antisocial behavior of the individuals there.
In his work Mik investigates the notion of self-awareness and self-will, the idea that an individual stands separate from his environment, from the social and physical space that surrounds us. His videos and installations investigate a situational dynamic of regulated behaviour within uncontrollable processes, a dynamic that at once evokes both plausibility and theatricality. By focusing on the tensions between individuals and collective identity or behaviour, the viewer is challenged to evaluate his own actions and perceptions. Through the use of life-size projections to show these different mobile and multiple perspectives, the differentiation between the experience of the surrounding space and the fictional experience of the video projections is obscured. It is a game of converging realities that allows observation to be absorbed into a participation that is both cognitive and physical, as well as emotional.

Middlemen (2001)
Italian première - video-installation
courtesy  carlier | gebauer