The carpet, the map, the voices in the work of Studio Azzurro from CORO to Il confine dei corpi

Abstract

Il confine dei corpi (The border of the Bodies) is one of the most recent interactive works by Studio Azzurro (2021): it is a carpet inhabited by images sensitive to our passage, a physically walkable surface, where the map as a system of trajectories is replaced by clayey traces of bodies that laboriously drag themselves, sensitize their own “boundaries”, make skin and sink of original material, crossed by the voices of a huge loudspeaker that dominates them. Its (not only iconographic) roots can be traced in a previous work by Studio Azzur-ro, Coro (1995): one of their first sensitive environments, where this connection between the symbolic and imaginative texture of the carpet, possible map of bodies and identities in motion, and ambiguous and polyvalent vocality is already thematized in a meaningful and relational sense. The article proposes a possible reading of these works, according to the coordinates of the “algorithmic turn”, focusing in particular on the dynamics of the interaction between body and image.