The Box of Life

"Federica Marangoni's The Box of Life is a record of a performance, documented in video tinted to a golden sienna. (The Box of Life [...] was shot on 16mm film directed by Gianluigi Poli. It was later transferred on open reel. See Lorenzo Magri (ed.), Centro Video Arte: 1974-1994. Videoarte performance partecipazioni (Ferrara: Gabriele Corbo, 1995), p. 27 n. 21). The artist opens a cabinet and removes, one at a time casts of body parts. A face, a female torso, a single breast, a hand, an arm, a leg, feet. She carries each part over to a table, on which she places them in an approximate shape of a body. Ms. Marangoni is tall and athletic: the body fragments, if not actually cast from molds of her own body, certainly represent it. A foot falls over. She unhesitatingly stands it upagain. She scatters a few red clusters of an indeterminate substance around the pieces. When the parts are laid out, the artist slowly picks up a gas jet and deliberately applies the fame to everything on the table. It roars and hisses. The heat is papable. The anatomical elements melt, gideously, decaying and decomposing, the face especially retaining its human form for too long, while the red clusters melt more evenly, spreading into a blood-red sea in which the now deformed body parts lie. Satisfied with her work, the artist puts a transparent mask on her face, then gives similar masks to seven viewers sitting in a row, whom we now see for the first time. She sits in the middle of them. The piece ends with an Italian translation of the epitaph on Marcel Duchamp's headstone ('D'altronde sono sempre gli altri che muoiono' in English 'Anyway, it's always other people that die'). (Source : Grahame Weinbren, "Symbols and Materials", Rewind Italia: Early Video Art in Italy, Laura Leuzzi & Stephen Partridge (dir.), John Libbey, New Barnet, 2016, p. 149 et 164.)