Preludio (2025), a video and multichannel sound installation, drifts between memory, dream and digital poetry. The work unfolds as a sensory architecture – part room, part cosmic archive – in which the subconscious takes shape.
The question “Have we met before?” sounds like a mantra, forming the core of a stream of images, sounds and words that loop and dissolve. Special software generates the moving texts; luminous points connect like neurons in a dreaming brain, while words dissolve and reform, echoing the rhythms of the dream in which human and digital bodies transform.
Visitors enter a digital dreamscape filled with birdsong, rain, flowing blood and a beating heart: at once familiar and uncanny. The work originates from two events: a near-death experience, and a dream Silvia Gatti had about her late mother, in which a lullaby becomes a gentle bridge between memory, loss and identity.
Preludio draws on a constellation of references – from Tarkovsky and Fellini to media studies, memory research and posthumanist philosophy – embracing contrasts: recognition and estrangement, analogue and digital, vulnerability and strength. In the final moments, footsteps are heard. Someone approaches, unseen. Then a voice begins to sing: a lullaby, not as an ending but as an invitation to return.
– Eva Langerak
Film details
- Country of production
- Netherlands
- Year
- 2025
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2026
- Length
- 7'
- Medium/Format
- Other
