Seeing Beyond Fading is an installation comprising 5 video channels and one audio track. Together, they evoke the heat pulses of the environment and the people inhabiting palliative care facilities.In film editing language, “fade in” and “fade out” mark the appearance and disappearance of an image; here, the artwork subverts this meaning, striving to see beyond the dissolve by using thermal cameras to record the transition from life to death. Thanks to the collaboration and support of Professor Ines Testoni, Director of the Master in Death Studies, FISPPA Department at the University of Padua, I was able to connect with the staff of the Hospice Casa del Vento Rosa – IPAB (Rovigo), obtaining permission to access the structure’s various spaces and the care and support activities adopted by the healthcare assistants (OSS). Through a series of weekly appointments starting in September 2024, I forged relationships with patients and caregivers. With an artistic and medical-scientific purpose, I began filming with thermal cameras, recording the transfer of heat from one body to another in the form of proximity, all the way up to the rigor mortis phase. Within the PAC (Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea) spaces the monitor at the entrance introduces the hospice from an external view; the video editing mirrors the rhythm of the structure’s surveillance cameras, revealing the heat of the building where warm colours show that the architecture itself is a living body. The large environmental projection records the slow extinguishing of one of the patients, naturalizing the moment in the space as if it were a great sunset to be collectively contemplated. The ephemerality of the video projected directly onto the PAC pool wall becomes a second skin of the institution designed by Ignazio Gardella. Seen from the garden, the video becomes a landscape and relates to Fausto Melotti’s Sette Savi. Inside the exhibition rooms, 3 monitors display the practices of sanitizing the deceased person’s room and the operations of transporting the body, where the rhythms are fast-paced and automatic. In this passage between the visible and the invisible, death ceases to be an end and is revealed as a continuum. Seeing Beyond Fading is an exhibition conceived as a perfect loop with a total duration of approximately 40 minutes, corresponding to the time of rigor mortis.
“Seeing Beyond Fading” by Daniele Costa is a project produced by Careof, curated by Marta Cereda, in collaboration with Carolina Gestri. Sound design and sonic elements by Mauro Martinuz. The setup is conceived and developed by Studio GISTO.
The project is realized with the support of MiC and SIAE, as part of the “Per Chi Crea” program, in collaboration with the Palliative Care Residential Center “Casa del Vento Rosa” in Lendinara (Ro), with the support and backing of Ines Testoni and the Master in Death Studies & the End of Life, Third Mission project, University of Padua.
