Red Orbits

Grazia Toderi chose to project video because her material is light that travels and that appears when it encounters a surface, and also because it can be transmitted simultaneously throughout the world. Light also makes our existence possible, arriving from the stars, a mysterious energy with which we play and live. And it is while looking at the light that draws luminous geometries in the sky, the constellations, that man has built cities, seeking a continuous relationship between sky and earth. “Orbite Rosse” (Red Orbits, 2009) is a double video projection created for the Venice Biennale. The projected light brings out a stratification of transparences and lights, of cities that are superimposed and continuously transform, and two broad ovals, celestial or terrestrial maps, colored planispheres or cosmograms, upon which luminous tracings dance, trajectories, “invisible cities,” imagined thinking of Italo Calvino and the large lithograph “Venetie MD” (Venice 1500) by Jacopo de’ Barbari, now in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. “Projections” of light that penetrate our consciousness through the two mysterious “red orbits” of our eyes, which direct the images of our head-world.