A conversation with Margherita Landi, from “Dealing with Absence” to “Landi’s Cube”
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Dancer Margherita Landi continues her practical and theoretical exploration in the realm of Virtual Reality, leading to two dance projects in collaboration with Agnese Lanza. These projects were featured in technology and theater festivals, including Peaceful Places (awarded the 2021 Auggie Award for Best Art at the AWE – Augmented World Expo in the USA) and Dealing with Absence (recognized for Residenze Digitali in 2021). Both projects delve into the emotional states evoked by images within the dancer’s or user’s VR headset.
Peaceful Places is a virtual reality dance experience where the headset becomes the audience’s tool to reacquaint themselves with the human instinct of embrace. On the other hand, Dealing with Absence offers the audience a glimpse into a private, intimate journey executed by performers wearing VR headsets, and dancing movements inspired by films (such as Tarkovsky’s Mirror or Bergman’s Persona) exploring the theme of absence through gestures . The audience can witness this journey from afar, behind their online screens, while maintaining a clear awareness that this framework is absent for the performers, who are immersed in the virtual reality headset throughout.
The connected audience streams the dancers choosing physical spaces to “set” their theme of absence, experiencing the tension between the perception of the place shown in the headset and the one they are in. Absence as a new presence: the VR device constantly calls us back, as noted by Antonio Pinotti and Francesco Casetti, to the sense of presentness, along with that of unframedness and immediateness. “Presentness,” the authors suggest, “should be understood in a double sense: of the user feeling present in the environment (a condition frequently referred to through the formula ‘being there’), and of the digital objects perceived as actually present in the space-time of the user.”
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