Urbana @ Valentina Berardinone. 1973

- BERARDINONE Valentina, Urbana: The Hand as Phenomeon-Image, 1973. (film).

« In the general context of my work th use of film, and in this, the use of the body (i.e. the hands), have a particular place. The basic theme of my artistic research is the happening – or what he happened. By this I mean the recording of a modification to the given order, the attempt to make evident the dynamic ambiguity of the passage from a state of order to a state of disorder, which in its turn presents itself as an apparent order: the process can go on ad infinitum. 

The use of film is inevitably involved in this theme of the ‘happening.’ I have chosen the hand as a recurrent basic element in my films, that is, a phenomenon-image which, in its historicity, could be a link between myself and the external world. That is why the hand is seen mainly as gestures; it is not, as far as I am concerned, a morphologic element rediscovered as a place of shelter or as an intimistic situation, but as a projection of creativity outside myself.

The hand neurotically cleans the windowpane, it springs from under a step and reaches toward the light, it writes on a sheet of paper, it erases some writing, it is clenched, it throws a stone. These actions involve motions which are happenings and knowledge at the same time; the hand – the terminal part of the body, the one intended for contact with the things that surround us – make gestures which synthesize the event (the hand itself being an event), turning itself into the protagonist and the catalyzer, becoming therefore a permanent reference point for every act of verification. »