Pauline Curnier Jardin, Le Lente Passioni, 2020-2023
During the first Italian confinement of 2020, Pauline Curnier Jardin collected and edited a series of videos from a Facebook group of ethnomusicologists. The scenes show different Easter masses and processions in Catholic Europe, mostly in Italy. In a lockdown society, religious ceremonies and rituals could not be done collectively, forcing believers to attend them virtually. Curnier Jardin amassed a rich archive of ritualistic footage from before and during confinement and created a polyphonic compilation of collective religious emotion.
In a tripartite structure, at the crossroads of a church confessional, a domestic space and a camping site, the film is broadcast on a television that seems to take the place of the altar and the officiant.
Religious rites mingle with mundane ones. The television, the filmic eye, the gaze of the believer/spectator and the confessional window intertwine in a complex web of scopic devices. The panopticon, the confessional and the dinette merge into each other.
