The project began from an inner need to face a theme concerning a biological and affectional bond: that with my father and his illness.
Renzo, seventy years old, suffers from Alport syndrome, which causes major kidney insufficiency and a consequent need for dialysis. Since March 2018, he has therefore undergone peritoneal dialysis from home, in which the blood vessels of the abdominal wall carry out the function of the kidneys with the help of a special liquid (dialysate), filtered by the peritoneal space. The contact between the machine that introduces the liquid into the body and the body itself takes place through a tube that comes out of the patient’s abdominal cavity; when the dialysis is carried out, in my father’s case during the night, the tube is hooked up to the machine for eight hours.
The work deals with my father’s everyday life, with methodical observation and with the desire to investigate some of the themes on the edge between the idea of life and that of the illness itself.
The diary is condensed into a simple day-by-day observation carried out over the week: the days are thus punctuated by the daily repetition of the dialysis.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with a single break on Sunday: these are the days my father is forced to depend on an external machine to carry out that function that his body is unable to. Harmony is therefore the narration of everyday time going by, one no longer marked out by regular and conventional rhythms but interrupted by the illness: by day, the living process continues regularly, without major changes; by night, time is regulated by the artifice of the machine, by its phases and functions. The video offers the chance to form a diary of the process of splitting up my father’s life, through an account both of the daytime phase, in which the patient is anchored to the solid image of himself as someone still alive, and the night-time phase, in which the need appears to make use of an external machine in order to hold onto that healthy image that his mind recalls. In its observational analysis, Harmony – which is also the name of the dialysis machine – revolves around the concept of deposit and repetition. The illness in fact induces material to settle that the kidneys are no longer able to filter: the dialysis machine thus removes the deposits and restores a condition of normality which starts all over again the next day. The settling process tames the quotidian dimension, which moves around and within my father’s life: a series of habits, times and references that contribute to maintaining the sense and awareness of his own life during the illness.
The repetition is instead the representation of the time lived by my father and the recurrence of the same moments in an everyday link that binds him once more to a previously established time.
A repetition which nevertheless “is no longer the sad succession of the identical, but of shifted difference.” (1)
The project is therefore the representation of a cycle, a continuous annotation on surviving one’s own condition, of the deposit of actions and materials, of a time dictated by and that dialogues with the artificial in contrast with reality, the upshot of a desire which remains, despite the illness. The external artifice in fact generates new reality, the awareness of a new time which gives my father the chance to continue to live and interpret time, feeling part of his life and his actions.
1. G. Deleuze, Differenza e Ripetizione, Bologna, Il Mulino edizioni, 1968
