The Mask of Time

Commissioned by Vittorio Cini and inaugurated in 1954, the open-air amphitheatre designed by architect Luigi Vietti (1903-1998) has often been an important cultural venue in Venice and has hosted excellent productions of the performing arts. In 2021 the theatre was the subject of a major restoration project that, thanks to a partnership with Cartier,  brought its architecture back to life and made the most of all the qualities of the building materials, the surrounding greenery, the fascinating spaces and the stunning landscape views.

To enhance this beautiful theatre and relaunch its leading creative role, Fondazione Giorgio Cini invited Mattia Casalegno, one of Italy’s most successful digital artists based in New York, to create a work that would showcase the beauty of the theatre starting from the photogrammetric acquisition carried out with drones by Factum Foundation, an institutional partner of ARCHiVe. Curatorship is by Ennio Bianco.

In The Mask of Time, the architecture and history of the Teatro Verde have been brought back to life in a world inhabited by hyper-realistic avatars, made through the creative use of pioneering 3D animation and text processing software, combined with sound designed by Maurizio Martuscello aka Martux_m. The avatars will become actors performing the theatre’s great historical productions. Photorealistic digital human beings are immersed in real sets as well as dreamlike environments in a post-human sci-fi world, somewhere between fiction and representation, in which Nature and Art breathe and flourish. The narrative unfolds through intense imagery in four acts on the subject of the Teatro Verde: History, Performances, Present and Future. It thus explores themes such as teatri di verzura (garden theatres), the golden age of the amphitheatre, and its dialogue with Nature, both dominated and dominating and now a creative force cooperating in the theatre’s new lease of life.

Mattia Casalegno’s work starts from the idea of theatre as a place of fiction and representation. Situated at the intersection between Nature and Culture, it explores the relationships and tensions that unite the natural environment, the human world, and technologies.

The project starts from the notion that people interact with the world through multiple sensory streams: we see objects, hear sounds, read words, feel textures, taste flavours, combine information, and form associations between the senses. Similarly, real-world data is made up of various signals occurring simultaneously, such as video frames and audio tracks, web images, captions, and voice tracks. Casalegno adopts this common logic in the creation of the multimodal work The Mask of Time.

In The Mask of Time, thanks to a combination of in-depth archival research on material held by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Theatre and Opera and the innovative application of Artificial Intelligence with the visual power of new kinds of software, the architecture and the history of the Teatro Verde have been brought back to life in a world inhabited by hyper-realistic avatars. Fundamental is also the creative use of pioneering 3D animation and text processing software, combined with sound designed by Martux_m and the costume designs of the 3D garments by Amin Farah. All of these competencies are perfectly blended into a single artistic meta-language.

In the future it will be possible to draw on all the materials used for this video, for example, to recreate paths inside the Teatro Verde enabling audiences to converse with characters generated in augmented reality, or to offer an interactive virtual tour experience of the Teatro Verde in a metaverse.