Marathon (2023)

In a long-distance race, just like in music, time changes. The inexorable chronos gives way to a particular speed of events related to the pendular movement of breathing and the pacing of the feet hitting the ground; an imaginary time that is only possible because — just like in music — a series of complex mechanisms operates in secrecy, in precise synchronisms.

I have always been fascinated by the particular case of the marathon: firstly, by the legend of its origin, and by the self-inflicted brutality of Pheidippides, the soldier-messenger who sacrifices himself, not for a god, not for glory, but out of an acute (and fatal) sense of duty. Then, the way a trivial human act — running — can, through time and willpower, transform into a battle against exhaustion, metamorphosing into a solitary and symbolic act of survival, a resistance against silence and oblivion. But, above all, by the intimate drama that takes place within the runner: how, with every step, the way he/she processes and understands time and the world around him/her evolves.

From this poetic analogy between music and movement, Marathon emerged, which in its simplest form is a spiral-shaped ritual, a succession of mechanisms that are operated in different ways (initiated, interrupted, sabotaged), and of harmonic materials of a pendular nature: dense and laboriously constructed — from inspiration — or consonant and related to natural acoustic phenomena — from expiration.