VAF Wildcards Filmlab: KASK meets LUCA

Somewhere in the depths of space, the thoughts and memories of what once was are flying around. Here lies the palace of dust, inhabited by a transparent beast that rearranges, shifts and consumes all particles of dust. ​“Where am I?” echoes through the open space. In a feverish dream the beast takes a sleeping woman through the spaces of the palace and makes her look ​‘through the glass, darkly’ or through the dust, darkly. 

“We always used to call it dirt, blind to this whole universe. Only now do we realize how privileged dust mites actually are. They live in palaces of amazing beauty and it has never once crossed their minds to vanish into a cloud of dust.” – Josef Haslinger & Klaus Pichler (Dust, 2015)

Do I describe the world only as something light and safe?
Or are we going to try to –
Again.
Or are we going to –
Again.
Do I describe the world as something light?
Do I describe the world as something safe?
Or am I going to try to be more honest?
Do we dare to be honest?
And where do we start?

To my future child,

Tarantulas Sleep Under the Stones is inspired by a ritual that originated in the Middle Ages in South Italy: Tarantismo. It was a traditional magical-religious practice with the purpose of healing people, especially women, affected by convulsive movements attributed to the bite of the spider tarantula. I started by filming my mother, weaving an intergenerational dialogue about motherhood, daughterhood and womanhood. In parallel, I went to South Italy to search for the traces of this ancient ritual and its evolution in present times.

Through flickering candlelight, La Mer weaves a tapestry of memories, blurring the lines between past and present. In an ethereal realm of family dynamics, emotions dance and intertwine, mirroring the ephemeral nature of time itself. As candles dwindle, so do our recollections, leaving behind a poignant reminder of life’s fleeting moments.

Birthed from a personal experience and a poetic text written by the artist, the film dives into the feelings of loss, helplessness and overwhelm during the process of accepting the hurt inflicted by others. These emotional wounds are translated visually into a physical and pulsing presence that represent a dark and unsettling image of femininity.