‘The Papez circuit is an intracerebral path that processes experience and sensitivity based on the relevance to the subject and allows it to be memorized.’
The project starts from the story of Elisa, blind from the age of 17 due to a congenital disease. The work observes and traces, by means of video, her modalities of spatial redefinition and the interpretative needs of the world around her. For about four years, Elisa has been a co-pilot of rally, a sport that allows her to re-elaborate her own space and boundaries in relation to and thanks to her sensory activity.
Since Elisa lost her sight, the images she had experienced have remained in her memory, helping to determine a new process of comprehend the surrounding reality. This approach has created a new representation of space outside her.
The rally becomes the allencompassing experience that allows her to acquire sensations and stimuli by connecting them to images belonging to her memory. In fact, there are three main channels with which she assimilates information and through which she elaborates a full vision of the path: the fingertips linked to the tactile principle read the path, the proprioception of the body silhouetted on the seat receives the curves and movements, the imagination reactivates the areas of the brain that enabled her to see certain images before losing her sight.
The circuit becomes the experience of a different vision composed of different states of understanding, which mixes reality and the sensations received and processed in the vehicle. Five cameras have been inserted inside the cabin, observing and recording the ways of learning of external sensations by Elisa. The framing of the path becomes the image that she finds in her visual background, the one pointed on the bodies observes the contact with the seats, recording the movements and the sense of position in space; the point of view addressed to the road book in braille concludes the experiential cycle providing Elisa the ability to visualize the route.
The editing assembles a nonlinear narration following the race and the experience of Elisa, in which the black frames become the conditions of possibility for the experience to happen. The black traces the response of her vision, dissecting the sequence of different shots that lead the viewer towards the dialogue between the visual memory of Elisa and her representation of the outside.
The assembly thus unveils entire circuit, which is accomplished both through the race along the road layout and at a perceptive and intracerebral level, generating a different vision mode.
