THE LEANING AND BLIND (2017) – Sara Pathirane

12:02 min
FULL HD
2017
Director: Sara Pathirane
Camera: Sara Pathirane
Sound: Ariana van Gelder
Funder: VISEK

The Leaning and the Blind (2017) depicts the gestural choreography by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Pisa has long been a multicultural harbor city where people from all over the world have arrived. Now in the era of mass tourism, people from Asia, the Americas, the Middle East and Europe are coming to the famous bell tower of Pisa every day. After the sun rise, there is not a second when people are not photographing the tower. Posing with the tower is like a global broken phone. People mimic and guide each other and try to reach a classical photo and pose with the tower: the tower is about to fall, but the poser manages to keep it up. From these posing, a collective choreography is created around the tower. Hundreds of strangers unfamiliar with to each other gestur simultaneously, like blind people who are exploring their way. A shared gestural language underneath the tower has been born maybe already during the after war tourism and it still goes on daily. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is as the Tower of Babel around which all languages meet in a collective body language.

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BIO

Sara Pathirane (1985) works on the field of media-art, expanded painting and live installation. She depicts human’s aesthetic and gestural behaviour in the landscape. She creates active video and painting installations that challenge the view process of the audience. At the moment she collaborates with dance artists in the new work series The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Sara Pathirane lives and works in Helsinki. Her works are in many collections in Finland and she has shown for example with Kiasma theatre, Huuto Gallery and Forum Box in Finland and internationally in venues suchs as Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin and Colombo Art Biennale.