MACHINE MOTHER
Video-animation by Paola Gandolfi
Produced by Elena Chiesa
Original music – Riccardo Giagni

Five paintings by Paola Gandolfi, set into motion, are the protagonists of the video MACHINE MOTHER. The static nature of the paintings hides infinite movements which are freed up in order to complete a course of actions.

The video offers “a journey within the mother”, a sort of Psycho-Iconic endoscopy, in search of lost objects within the complicated maternal universe. The trip leads to the most intimate and forgotten parts of the mother, in the discovery of “Electrifying links”.

The female body has mutable psychic and bodily limits, and “subverts the notion of bodily form as a fixed concept” says the philosopher Rosi Braidotti. In the period of pregnancy, the mother has the power to change shape while performing the miracle of creating a new being.

At the beginning, in the first minutes of the video, the body of the “Machine Mother” swells, forms a cocoon, becomes thinner; like an anomalous, monstrous machine. The body of the mother suppresses the expansion of her boundaries with her long hair, a metaphor for rational thought emerging from the head...

A miniscule foetus triggers a profound transformation, but only after severing the final links.

At the end, as a final transformation, the ‘Machine Spider’ appears – a woman with six legs, almost a spider, but stable and capable of weaving fine, electrical, positive threads...