audiovisual artist & filmmaker
ciucioflorinda@gmail.com
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Florinda Ciucio (Antwerp, 1993) is a visual artist and filmmaker based between Italy and Belgium. She graduated from LUCA School of Arts in Brussels as a film director. After directing several short films, she developed an interest in video art and installation work.
Her artistic practice focuses on the creation of immersive environments using moving image and sound, examining the relationship between the nervous system and the audiovisual medium. Influenced by her background in cinema, she works with fixed frames, darkened spaces, and suspended time.
Working with time as a central element, she uses rhythm, repetition, and routine to create slow, attentive moments that highlight the process of looking, listening, and paying attention in an overstimulated visual culture.
Her current research examines our relationship to landscape and technology, creating work that functions both sensorially and critically. Through this, her work engages with landscape as a constructed and mediated space, where technological processes actively shape how reality is seen, understood, and experienced. She uses media such as film footage, CGI, AI, archival video, sound design, photography, and spatial installations.
CV
FLORINDA CIUCIOTHE VESSEL
THE VESSEL
2021, 1H loop, 3-channel video installation
in the frame of an artist residency at Het Bos Art center, Antwerp
selected project as a laureate in Artcontest 2021
project support by BREEDBEELD
DESCRIPTION
‘THE VESSEL’ features three video projections paired with a pink-noise soundscape. Visitors enter a pitch-dark black-box room. The projections consist of selected fragments of old Super 8 films shot by my maternal grandparents, inland shipmen traveling in the 1970s.
The video projections are selected fragments of old Super 8 film material from my grandparents, who were inland shipmen between Holland, Belgium and Germany throughout the 70’s. The fragments contain passing landscapes, moving water and snapshots of life on deck.
The three projections are one and the same loop, but they all start at a different time, thus creating three different projections at any given moment, but still familiar to the audience. The images are projected at eye level, in a size in resemblance of a window. This way the viewer can imagine standing in the cabin of the ship, but because of the dark surroundings, the nostalgic images and the meditative soundscape more like in a dreamlike state, than trying to mimic reality.
Pink noise mimics sound signals of biological systems through the cyclical sounds of nature, such as rain, wind, rustling leaves or as in this case: water. Although this noise is purely synthesized, as soon as it gets combined with the video images situated on the ship, showing water in almost every frame, the brain automatically makes us believe we are listening to real water.
There are different layers of waves in the soundscape, varying in speed and intensity, and sometimes a far away ship/foghorn is added into the mix, supporting the overall hypnotic ambience of the installation. Seagull sounds are added to reinforce the nostalgic feeling and are an almost classic sound to stir a memory.
Pink noise has the quality to filter out all other sounds around us, helping people fall asleep or keep them longer in a deep state of relaxation. Combining these qualities with the imagery in a blackbox, a meditative exercise is created for visitors.
Thus the intention is for the viewer to be immersed in his or her inner world of memories through this meditation, meticulously crafted out of other’s memories.