By Keith Walsh
In a brand new video by Italian artist Francesca Bonci, One-Legged Heart evokes a dark sentimentality in a melodic techno song with deep deep bass and glitchy electronics. The musical half of this visual audio concept is Joe Linus, an American situated in North Carolina who has worked with Bonci for 8 years.
“You Can’t Go Home Again” talks about the loss of innocence, about the condemnation of wandering a strange land of war and surveillance. Along with some robot graphics and vintage film, Bonci incorporates her trademark repeating patterns and shifting colors.
“You Can’t Go Home Again” is the premiere release from October 31, 2024.
I asked Bonci a few questions about the creation of this mesmerizing video.
Popular Culture Beat: How did you go about compiling the classic film footage? Was it more like a scanning through process or was it more remembering films you’ve seen and then looking for those scenes?
Francesca Bonci: The selection part of the old films was curated by Joe Linus, the multifaceted artist behind the One-Legged Heart project.
For months Joe has been rewatching hundreds of videos and films in search of the perfect 3 seconds. I have only made the material more homogeneous. This is the fourth fruit of my collaboration with Joe in his O-LH project, but unlike the other times, in CGHA I have taken care almost exclusively of the technical part, editing, effects and colors and just a few tips. The concept was entirely thought up by Joe.
Popular Culture Beat: I saw the old French Joan of Arc film earlier this year and it blew me away. The Mars footage and the bike…. brilliant…. some references: Spielberg’s E.T. and “Bike Ride To The Moon” by Dukes Of Stratosphere.” �
Francesca Bonci: I don’t think it was intentional, but who knows, we are subconsciously full of input from our culture and our passions. We actually watched videos of little robots that could be inserted into our story and Joe found this wonderful little robot on a bicycle and we fell in love with it. Joe then wrote to the creator of the robot, Masahiko Yamaguchi (aka Dr Guero) for permission to use it and here is our little decontextualized friend running to work on the smoky dunes of Mars 😀
Popular Culture Beat: What was your thinking to move away for your usual process of making collages?
Francesca Bonci: It was really inspiring to work on this video with Joe. Joe and I have been collaborating since 2016, 8 years, during which we have always respected each other and have become very good friends. He always tells me that when we believe in something together he feels “like we are two children playing building sand castles on the seashore”. I have always loved this definition of our collaboration and our friendship. In this new project that has just ended I trusted an intriguing story that Joe proposed to me. We have explored new paths and dealt with current issues such as dystopia, computer-generated realities, mind control, the future controlled by machines, the possibility of seeing on other planets.… We used AI to create the actors in the film, Joe himself played the part of the musician mistaken for a criminal, he became a hologram, we brought great actors back to life by forcing them to play a new part in our visionary film. It was really fun and beautiful.
One-Legged Heart – ABOUT
Francesca Bonci LinkTree
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