Marta
Di Francesco


Poetics with code








Ariadne's Thread



Single channel video
2:45 min

PROXY Pavilion, The Wrong Digital Art Biennale 2020
The Unseen Festival Denver CO 2019
ADAF Athens Digital Arts Festival 2018
FILE Festival Exhibition, SESI Gallery of Art, Sao Paulo Brazil 2018
Bideodromo International Festival Bilbao 2019
Official Selection Athens Fashion Film Festival 2019
Showroom Award Berlin Fashion Film Festival 2018
Official Selection Fashion Film Festival Istanbul 2018
Official Selection Santiago International Fashion Film Festival 2018
Official Selection Sarajevo Fashion Film Festival 2018
VFNO Fashion Film Festival Milano 2017


"Women's View" Art Commission by VOGUE Italia and FFFMilano 2017.
Inspired by the homonym Greek myth, Ariadne’s thread is a piece about the tension and blending of opposites. Ariadne represents both pathos and logos, emotion and logic.
In the labyrinth, Ariadne encounters her opposite, the brutal and mysterious force of the Minotaur.

In the original story, Ariadne falls madly in love with Theseus and helps him navigate the labyrinth. According to most accounts she gives him a ball of thread, allowing him to retrace his path. Theseus kills the Minotaur with the sword of Aegeus and leads the other Athenians back out of the labyrinth. But on the way home, Theseus abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos and continues on.

Ariadne helps Theseus killing the Minotaur, with the aid of a thread, symbol of life, logic and the fabric of existence.
In this new interpretation, one leads to wonder what would happen, if Ariadne no longer relies on Theseus but faces her nemesis, the Minotaur, alone, and accepts that it is part of her.
In Ariadne's Thread, Ariadne confronts the Minotaur head-on. Her inner strength accepts a dual nature where the beautiful and the brutal co-exist, when the male and the female blend into one, where emotion and logic, vulnerability and strength cannot part from each other.

The very thread is what connects them together in an indiscernible oneness. The labyrinth is an archetype, a symbol that relates to wholeness, combining the image of the circle and the spiral into a meaningful path of awareness, a metaphor for the journey to the deep centre of the true self, and the absence of self.

The tension between the two resolves itself into a poetic blending of two beings into one.
In the Metaverse, identity is bodiless and genderless. It is fluid: bodies are connected, woven together by a common digital, metaphysical thread.

In a labyrinth, one does not lose oneself
In a labyrinth, one finds oneself.
In a labyrinth, one does not encounter the Minotaur
In a labyrinth, one encounters oneself.

(Hermann Kern)




























© Copyright Marta Di Francesco