The Face of Naples – Pandemic Tales came about the request from Theatre Bellini to the established contemporary artist Roxy in The Box to animate the five monitors which, like shop windows, look out from the theater. Multifaceted and socially active Roxy, who defines herself a “social pop artist” – her poetics ranges from paintings to performances, from video installations to campaigns for big brands – followed up the request by creating The Face of Naples. Pandemic Tales consists of 49 interviews featuring people of different ages and backgrounds. Roxy captured them individually on a real set, built on the theatre’s main stage. The videos therefore become installations, with particular attention to detail, from brushstrokes used to paint light, to the frame. The Pandemic Tales will be broadcasted 24/7 on the screens facing the street without any sound. Passers-by can watch but cannot hear: a shattering aesthetic whose visual impact progressively increases as daylight falls, which shows a mute pain, a metaphor on listening to our lives. For those wishing to listen to them, the interviews will be published in their extended versions on the Theatre Bellini website in a special section dedicated to the project. Roxy, in agreement with the director Candida Carrino, will hand over the pandemic stories to the Naples State Archives, which will form the first audiovisual nucleus housed by this Neapolitan institution.
With The Face of Naples I felt the urgency of interviewing people as testimonials of an ongoing life: a connection, mine, between past and future that only the present can guarantee us. What emerged from both researches is the freedom of a simple life based above all on work and human relationships…
Roxy in the Box
The Face of Naples – Pandemic Tales is a non-live performance: its protagonists recounted their loneliness on the Bellini stage, without an audience, eternalized by the video camera, and now they speak to passers-by, night and day, but without a voice. Forty-nine stories that seem to be told in another time, behind a screen, calling us without reaching us; This is a testimony of a time in which we all experienced the feeling of not being able to reach each other, but a performative testimony: that is, it reproduces that same impossibility of getting closer that its protagonists try to tell.
Siria Moschella
The Face of Naples: Roxy in the Box’s video installation about the pandemic.
The public art intervention, created in collaboration with the Bellini Theater of Naples, will be acquired by the State Archives, offering testimony on how Naples experienced the pandemic.