2024, River Sarno, Salerno, Italy
Infinity Pool combines participatory performance with reflective masks, a video installation, and phenomenological research.
Through performative means, we explore embodied cognition and disaster landscapes.
The first performance of Infinity Pool was developed in July 2024 at the Sarno River, the most polluted river in Europe, which flows between the provinces of Salerno and Naples in southern Italy.
Infinity Pool is structured as a participatory, masked performance that involves the inhabitants of a place as its performers. It includes a series of qualitative interviews and a video installation, which will be projected onto screens set up within the explored space itself.
The reflective mask was created in collaboration with the renowned Italian sculptor Ivano Troisi at his studio in Montecorvino Pugliano, Salerno, Italy, where the collective was hosted for a week-long residency in the days leading up to the inaugural performance.
The mask was molded in clay and made reflective through a three-step firing process: a biscuit firing, followed by an underglazing, and a second firing that rendered the glaze reflective. Its design features ambiguous characteristics inspired by both ancient Greek masks and those of Noh theater. In line with the “noh effect”, the mirror mask’s expression shifts when tilted, dynamically altering what it reflects. This interplay underscores the relationship between the environment’s expression and the actions we take within it. In practice, the reflective mask assumes a distinct “expression” by mirroring, for example, leaves, concrete, water, or waste, depending on the performer’s movements and the sociomaterial aspects encountered. An ultra-wide-angle camera was mounted on top of the mask, pointing at it to capture the mask itself and the distorted reflections it generates.
