I tesori dell’effimero. Wunderkammern, creazioni filmiche e il potere magico dell’immagine-oggetto

Two recent works, which are to be considered between film production and art video, worked on the ability of moving images to reviving and re-enacting the ancient tradition of the Wunderkammer. In fact, both Fiona Tan’s Disorient (Venice Biennale, 2009), and Agnès Varda’s Les plages d’Agnès (2008) show a tendency on the one hand to catalogue and hoard objects and images in a private place, because of their rarity and uniqueness; on the other hand, they thematize the desire to capture or release their innate magical power, as result of the collector’s personifications and fetishistic impulses. In particular, in Tan’s video, the Wunderkammer becomes a place of accumulation and assemblage, a symbol of the heterogeneity of the objects, the site of attraction toward the unknown and the eccentric; while Varda works more on a projective and memorial tension, able to model reality subjectivizing it. In this context, both works not only help clarifying the perception of the vital and organic nature of moving images – a nature which is similar to that of the magic elements that they reproduce – rather they also produce a wonder effect, emanating from the items making up the collections. Following the thread of a discussion on the potential of magic wonderment of Wunderkammern, the essay aims to follow the processes and the shapes adopted by the object as image and by the image as object.