Apnea is an open documentary that explores the dimension of the emotions of migrants who venture out to cross the sea.

Apnea proposes an inner itinerary that we can all recognise: a cartography of feelings and fears mapped using interactive immersive technologies and an exhibition of objects that were salvaged from the sea.

Apnea’s audio-visual contents were realized in Lampedusa (Italy).

In Apnea the sea is a boundary where everything disappears, a real border, but also a representation of the limit that separates life from death, from solitude, from void.

A SPECIAL PATH INTO IMMERSIVE AND INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

The visitor’s exploratory experience unfolds through three episodes or environments that offer different degrees of immersiveness and interactivity: a journey into our own deep identity through a first person path.

Visitors start this journey with a display of photographs, videos, pieces of writing and original artefacts founded after the 3 October 2013 shipwreck or brought on land by individual migrants. These are taken out of context and located in a procedural soundscape that is recomposed in real time.

The water, the sea and the objects are the central elements of the next two episodes, which were devised specifically to enable visitors to achieve an individual experience:

• the first is a space with an interactive projection that refers to a dive to the seabed, to primordial places that conflict with raw, real voices. As visitors move through the audio-visual environment, they modify it in real time.
• the second is a 360° video that enables visitors to plunge into the seas around Lampedusa. Creating this part of the work involved intense periods of research for shooting the footage, editing it, creating the spatial audio and programming a specific player.

THE PROJECT

The Apnea project came about when the Fondazione 107 for Contemporary Art came together with the platform of the Interactive Media Art Officine Sintetiche, which involves the CIRMA, the Department of Humanities at the University of Turin and the Department of Cinema Engineering and Communication Media at Politecnico di Torino. The International Castel dei Mondi Festival at Andria later also joined as a supporting partner.

In May 2016, the project won the Ora! Prize by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which enabled it to launch into a pre-project phase of training and research that led to the organisation of a public event in March 2016.

The research on field is made thanks to the journalist Valerio Cataldi, to the Comitato 3 ottobre and to Doctor Without Borders – Spain.

Apnea has involved students, researchers and lecturers from Turin Polytechnic and Turin University, as well as extramural professionals: altogether, a large group of more than 20 people.