Mala apokalipsa

(Minor Apocalypse)
by Alvaro Petricig
41', Betacam SP, Italy/Slovenia, 2008

Cisgne was a small hamlet in the Natisone Valleys, between Italy and Slovenia. Like many other mountain or marginal places, it was condemned to abandon and ruin by the economic logic of modern life. It was definitively abandoned after the 1976 earthquake when the only solution offered to its residents was to move to new homes at the valley line. Yet Cisgne remained up there, left to die and sink down in silence, because here the apocalypse is not announced by thunder and drum rolls. Sounds, not words, accompany us amid the ruins of the districts. The voices of the people interviewed, heard over fuzzy, grainy images, seem like alien voices, just as the landscape became alienated with the disappearance of its inhabitants. Shadows of faces appear, like  simulacra from the past. The objects scattered in the dust of the abandoned houses are seen next to the anonymous Formica furniture of the new, cold houses of those who “were” mountain dwellers. The drizzling rain underlines the desolation of the abandoned objects. And, finally, a fire goes out, like the end of life. 

Alvaro Petricig
Born in 1967, Alvaro Petricig lives and works as a graphic designer in the Natisone Valley (Udine). For some years he has been the coordinator of the Centro Studi Nediza (Nediza Study Centre), which is concerned with the research and documentation of its own territory of origin, for the realization of documentary films through experimentation with visual language. To this end, it also makes use of historical, photographic, and film archives.