The Italian city of L’Aquila has a population of around 70.000 inhabitants and it is the capital city of both the Abruzzo Region and the Namesake province. On April 6, 2009, an earthquake of 6,3 magnitude struck central Italy.
309 people were killed, twenty of them were children and around 65.000 people became homeless. The earthquake was felt in all central regions of the peninsula, damaging also historic buildings in other adjacent provinces.
In 2014 Paolo Porto aims to do a tribute to the history of L’Aquila and its beauty, reporting the real situation of the reconstruction of some magnificent buildings of the old town center. The author wants to draw attention to some abandoned places of the city, which have been photographed for the first time after the quake. In doing so, the author decided to choose some desolated places inside the red zone, revitalizing them through the presence of naked bodies in movement.
In this way the involvement of dancers, provides a new interpretation of the space that surround human bodies, but it is also a way to give back life inside some buildings that are definitely closed. Women’s bodies move through the ruins, such as in the medieval squares of St. Dominic and St. Peter, or inside private palaces and public offices.
The evolution of the performance draws an imaginary path, set in a space that now is unusual to human movements, so that the author gave life to a huge contrast between the grace of bodies performing and the static scaffoldings that surround old buildings. The result is that the audience can imagine the movement of the dancer, but is totally attracted by the contrast with the background in which the body is set. None of the photos have been processed in post-production and all of them remained faithful to the original scene.
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