VELORIVELO 1.5

1.5° C. This is the threshold within which to limit the increase in global temperature in the near future, established during the work of the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2023 (also known as COP28, organised in Dubai last winter). It is a challenging and ambitious goal.

As the thermal images in the exhibition show (made with two FLIR ONE thermal cameras by students of the Expanded Cinema course, master’s degree in Scritture e progetti per le arti visive e performative), even common behaviours, small gestures, as well as seemingly harmless actions that we perform in our daily routine, require energy production and have a thermal impact on the planet we inhabit. All this often happens without us being able to realise it with our eyes.

VELORIVELO 1.5 focuses on the limits of optical vision and the ambiguous status of thermal visuality. The exhibited images, devoid of perspective, shadows, details, and with their unnatural colour fields animated through the use of augmented reality, take the perception of reality beyond the visible.

By detecting heat, they also reveal a world that appears otherwise: both in the sense of un-veiling it (what we cannot see of it, such as heat, now becomes finally visible) and re-veiling it (making invisible, on the other hand, everything that is in substantial thermal equilibrium with the environment).