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Relic belongs to ‘The Image as Origin’ project (see www.alessandrosau.it).
I started this project when visiting my grandparents at the cemetery of San Michele in Cagliari, I discovered people began to consider more appropriate to put Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs close to their loved ones’ graves, rather then the traditional religious figures like angels and saints. In this video I attempted to no longer consider Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in terms of aesthetic values and kitsch category. The image is conceived like an anthropological necessity of image, and it is subject to a
very strong link between eroticism and knowledge. This link is absolutely true if we consider that in order to know, and consequently to believe, in a thing, we have to touch it, we must open, lacerate, destroy it. Relic concludes with a strong explosion that represents the inevitable result of what long and tension-filled gazes will produce when shared between a beautiful lady and seven little men. With the explosion the body has been opened, the image has been opened. Relic is what remains after the explosion: fragments of a process in which the totality of desire might be set and concentrated. The desire survives into the gaze, and this is the reason why the dwarves will never bury Snow White under the ground. The dialogue between the Seven Dwarfs and Snow White is a reference to Duchamp’s green box texts.