A man in a park is looking for something

A man in a park is looking for something is a performance piece created within the Stazione Creativa project -“The ideal park” from an idea by Studio Azzurro and realized during Parma 360 Festival curated by Chiara Canali and Michele Putorti.

Our work focused on the Via Verona park area affected by hardship problems typical in recently urbanized suburbs. The area, in fact, is a well-known drug dealing square in the northern outskirts of the city and residents avoid it for fear of fraud or intimidation.  

The result is a performance that focuses on contact as a key to accessing social issues and that plays and jokes with the symbols of the park as an architectural space. The performer is seated on a bench, the faint, pulsating light of a street lamp defines the surrounding space, the smell of mown grass and ambient music define a dreamlike, suspended, tense scenario.

At the physical contact between the visitor and the performer, thanks to a capacitive sensor, the space changes: the light of the lamp becomes more intense and quivering, the sound more deafening and the projection of a video in first person appears that runs along the wide area of ​​the park. At the end of the contact between the performer and the visitor, the environment returns to the initial configuration.  

 The capacitive sensor, connected to the performer’s leg, is controlled by an Arduino micro which at each contact (change of electricity) changes the behavior of the lamp and sends a MIDI message to the server that activates the projection and alters the sound.