PRELUDIO
Art Directions International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026. Katoenhuis, Rotterdam. Video and multichannel sound installation, coded poetry, aluminium sculpture, condenser coils and resins.
Preludio is a video and a multichannel sound installation that navigates the boundaries between memory, dream, and digital poetry.
Structured as a sensory architecture (part chamber, part cosmic archive) the work examines how the body becomes both vessel and witness, simultaneously housing presence and absence. At its core, Preludio poses an intimate, existential question: “Have we ever met before?” a phrase that recurs as repetition, like a mantra, drifting through images, soundscapes, and poetic texts that layer and unravel in loops.
The installation explores déjà vu as a powerful point of convergence between memory and embodiment, an elusive transition in perception that feels like a fragmentation of different moments in time. It becomes a metaphor for resilience, and the fragile continuity of self. In this liminal space, the dream emerges not as escape, but as space of defiance, a place for a radical reclamation of the self, of the body, and of one’s narrative. Dreams become sites of resistance, survival, and quiet spiritual revolt.
A crucial dimension of Preludio lies in its custom-programmed software through which the artist created both the fragmented textual animations and the generative opening sequence, where drifting dots begin to connect across the screen like firing neurons in a dreaming brain. This sequence mimics a neurological network coming online, invoking themes of memory, perception and intelligence. The code controlling the poetic text is intentionally injected with a self-written “memory virus”, a disruptor script designed to break syntax and fracture linearity. As the text unravels and recombines, it mirrors the dream’s own logic: nonlinear, broken, and constantly reassembling. In this ongoing mutation, the body, both human and digital, reveals its capacity for survival and reinvention.
Throughout Preludio, the viewer is invited into a digitally constructed dreamscape, populated with sequences of digitalised natural elements like the sound of birds, the wind, the rain, the blood flowing in our body, the heart beat, that pulse against the screen. This simulated nature is at once familiar and remote, prompting the question: What will become of nature when it is no longer outside of us, but only inside the machine? The visuals, paired with layers of whispered text, evoke the tension between inner and outer realities, physical sensation and digital abstraction.
