Reflecting on the complex architecture and memory of the palace, the work investigates the ambiguous relationship we have with the present time, both flow and stasis, promise and decay. The video installation is the result of a stratification of elements: the moving image, the sound – fruit of the collaboration with Mauro Martinuz and Alberto Paolini – and the text by Matteo Melchiorre, read by the artificial intelligence Elsa AI from Free Text to speech.
In Tenuto Immerso, Daniele Costa scours the labyrinthine rooms of Palazzo Soranzo-Novello, from the upper floors, to the counters, down to the underground vault. The historic building was in fact for decades the headquarters of Banca Popolare di Castelfranco and, later, of Vicenza: everything remained unchanged, from the painful bankruptcy of 2017 and the consequent closure of the building, until the first months of 2023. Chasing the rare cuts of light that filter from the outside, the gaze moves warily, stopping from time to time to X-ray some details with sudden color inversions of the image. The subjective point of view, almost videogame, suggests a somewhat disorienting overlap between the subject who looks and the one who wanders among the decorations of the eighteenth-century halls, the interiors of the seventies, the halos left by the frescoes hastily removed from the walls after the bank failure.
The sound design takes up and deconstructs the piped music typical of commercial spaces: the sounds were recorded in the same rooms of the building, to then be re-located or altered. The text created for the work by Matteo Melchiorre, which traces the history of the Palazzo through glimpses at times hyperbolic, is instead read by an artificial voice. Its hypnotic tone, which recalls the indications provided by medical machines, clashes with that of the text, lofty and poetic, emphasizing the disorientation produced by the insistent subjectivity of the video. As the Palace continues to twist on itself like the innards of a monstrous organism, we wonder who is wandering the interiors of the palace – or what? What is he looking for, or what is he hiding from?
