OLGA (Outdoor Lab for Gathering the Absence) – Lia Cecchin

Gagliano del Capo has always been a city of departures and arrivals. The migrations of the many locals who had to move elsewhere for lack of work, the younger ones who still move and then sometimes come back for study, the people who have prematurely missed leaving their affections and those who stop in Gagliano to enjoy the wonderful landscape and the beautiful sea make this place one of the places that has more to do with the question of memory.
OLGA (Outdoor Lab for Gathering the Absence) uses a pre-existing app (FlashFace) that uses the programming language that for some years now is also used by the police in the construction of the identikit. In this case, instead, the app is used to put the spectator in front of the formalization of his own memory: what is normally just thought will take shape becoming face thanks to an instrument that tests the mnemonic baggage of those who will decide to use the instrument. As happens with stories, which from story to story are enriched with details, losing others, even the memory of a person’s image, no matter how dear, runs the risk in time to falsify the original. OLGA wants to put the audience in front of the possibility of discovering it, the construction of portraits apparently perfect and realistic, but at the same time insidious and fallacious.