Mezomaro

Giuliana Racco’s black and white film Mezomaro, whose title comes from the word meaning “Mediterranean” in Esperanto. The work combines animated chalk drawings, photographs, newspaper clippings and archival images to explore ideas of mobility and citizenship, poetically expanding current global situations to the history of people and geography over time. Drawing on Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516) – a work which contains both a proto-science-fiction and a battle scene on Lampedusa, where Racco’s photographs were taken – Mezomaro references our contemporary context by shedding light on how a minuscule island located between continents is connected to a global crisis situation via the multitude of people from different areas of the world attempting to reach its shores.