At Sea

At Sea works on two meanings at once: the literal condition of being at sea during a crossing, and the figurative one — disorientation, lost bearings, control suspended.

The installation was built around the work of Labanof, the forensic lab in Milan that identifies migrants lost at sea. Working from the documents and the identification cases the lab shared with us, we took as our subject the personal objects found on the recovered bodies: four of them — a phone, a necklace, a ring, a watch — hang on nylon threads like finds brought up from the water, each tied to a real story from Labanof's records. The lab gives these bodies back a name; the installation extends that gesture, opening the sea like a casket and returning presence to lives that would otherwise stay invisible.

The space is a room built inside a room: autopoles and white sheets cut out a quiet place, and a ceiling of thermal foil lit by two Amaran 300s and kept moving by fans throws refractions that read as light under water. Four projectors cover the walls with archival footage edited in DaVinci Resolve, deliberately free of AI so that no body or face is simulated, while a quadraphonic composition — a voice, water samples, a low drone — loops around the visitor from four corners.

With Lorenzo Mannoni I handled the Media side: the interaction and the systems behind it. Each visitor is given headphones, and plugging them into the jack at one of the four pedestals is the trigger — a Bare Conductive Touch Board sends the signal to Max, which starts that object's voiceover in the headphones and routes its video, through a matrix, to the projector facing the station. Listening becomes a deliberate, private act.

Made with Delli Santi Maria Chiara, Cecilia Olivero, Auriemma Matteo, Brunello Simone, Zambotto Sofia and Lorenzo Mannoni for Sistemi Interattivi 2.