35mm, live film performance projected with a live performance of Arvo Pärt’s passion cantata Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secondum Joannem (1982), 74 min

Netherlands, Italy, USA 2007

“Made with the participation of eleven film archives around the world, Passio is a 35 mm found-footage work projected with a live performance of Arvo Pärt’s 1982 passion cantata, Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secondum Joannem. […] Cherchi Usai destroyed the original negative after the creation of seven numbered prints, even making a video that shows him taking to the negative with an axe to prove that the event took place. These prints were then hand-colored, each in a different hue: ruby, violet, indigo, magenta, vermillion, minium, and gold. Six were deposited at film archives around the world; a seventh remains in Cherchi Usai’s possession. Cherchi Usai has explained his use of live music in Passio as resulting from the fact that the film ”requires a human presence,” but the particular choice of a piece that thematizes the last days of Christ – a time of suffering that prepares the way for redemption – also has significant resonances for the medium of film in an age of obsolescence. […] Cherchi Usai rejects the capacity for reproduction that has long been considered a central feature of film and proposes instead that film is a medium of singularity. Cherchi Usai’s cultivation of rarity occurs not out of a need to render the work fungible on the art market but instead out of a desire to advance the proposition that photochemical film is aligned with authenticity, uniqueness, and frailty of the human over and above the mechanical sameness of the machine, that it is an evanescent performative event rather than a repeatable object.” (Balsom 2017: 169–170)

Paolo Cherchi Usai, born 1957, in Rossiglione, Italy, lives and works in New York.

Reference

Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness. A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).