Below the Thunders of the upper Deep

Deep water, the unbreathable dimension for all terrestrial beings, signifies asphyxiation and nonlife, yet it also harbors treasures, archives relics, and nurtures the birth of new narratives. Yet the journey into the deep sea commences before one touches the water. Valeriana Berchicci’s “Rapid Follies” (2012) unfurls with a flick of the wrist on film, an immersion in the primordial human gesture: the sign. In Despina Charotonidi’s “To Fall with Grace” (2022), the Naiads, a Greek team of synchronized swimmers, emerge from their aquatic realm to dance in the arid urban setting of a construction site, unveiling their aquatic movements on land. Sarah Sharp’s “Finding Our Place in Space” (2017) portrays two parallel scenarios from 1974, both manifesting immersivity in an alien context—one on the Martian landscape and the other within the feminist utopia of the Oregon Women’s Land Trust. Following a deep breath on dry land, the descent into the water realm begins. Ifor Duncan’s “The Shipwreck Starts Here” (2021) portrays the sea as a space of floating detention and confinement, examining it from two perspectives: immersion in the sea while on land and, conversely, from the sea’s vantage point onto the land. Sara Tirelli’s “Hydra” (2020) transports us into a submerged, post-apocalyptic setting that weaves together James Ballard’s science fiction in “The Drowned World” (1964), and Baratto & Mouravas’s “Future Relics” (2018) unravels a historical labyrinth connected to a sunken Nazi ship off the coast of the Antilles. To conclude, in the visual essay “For an Aesthetics of the Apocalypse” (2022), Andrea De Fusco presents an ascending progression of apocalyptic imagery, accompanied by the words of philosopher Gianni Garrera. The Italian translator of the Book of the Apocalypse reminds us of Hegel’s principle of the conflict between nature and culture and how the world’s destruction shall be God’s ultimate - and most beautiful - work of art.