Warp and Weft

This is the critical essay accompanying the performance "Scala 1:18" by Marco Dalbosco

Behind the intertwining of textiles the remnants of the history of modern society are concealed. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the middle of the 18th Century, brought about the textile industries that drove people from the countryside to the city, to serve in the factories. The constant and never changing rhythm of factory machines has since lasted for centuries upon centuries.

With a long experience as a worker in an Italian textile factory, Dalbosco, originally from the Trentino region of Northern Italy, has taken on the meanings of factory work, investigating its dynamics. Following Guy Debord’s idea of society as a spectacle, instead of the spectacularization of the production system, the alienation of the individual, the suspension of a thinking being and the unavoidable conformation to the masses underline Dalbosco’s work. Still following Debord’s ideas, the same suspension is applied to the definition of art: every artwork holds a crystallized and closed eternity within it, whereas the direct experience of the ephemeral carries forward the concept of situation. A situation’s flux expires in the space of an action, and in this clever passage suspension is transformed into movement.

Dalbosco’s performance not only engages with but also engrosses the public; there is no account of its fleeting passage but for the films and photographs, today’s techniques of reproduction. In Scala 1:18, five performers, all dressed and with their hair in the same style, move according to the imagined trajectory of a warp and weft. They weave the void, pushing it towards something unknown as if to redeem the mechanics of alienation. It may succeed for a second, yet they can neither go beyond their starting point nor change a predetermined trajectory, as this would result in the breakdown of the machine put into motion. Hence, the dancers/performers are stuck in a never-ending production. A performance that appears to be a metaphor for our own thoughts: the movement may appear free but it is, without our knowing, constructed and constricted.