Confine

A video opera whose conception is not only based on an extremely ambitious intellectual combinatorics, but which also requires the recipients to recall their cultural background to memory: this is Nina Carini’s artistic contribution, who consciously defines it with a single and not so sensational concept: “Border”. A pretty neutral title that reminds of the simple designation of what, in spiritual as in practical life, separates two settings.
Therefore, as title of her work Nina Carini uses a word that, in its original sense can refer to the most diverse meanings of a border, among which the crucial one must be included: the line that differentiates and separates various parts from each other, whether they are topographical zones, regions, and states, but also perceptive fields, spaces, dimensions, spheres, or horizons of thought.
“Border” can also define the fact that a familiar life is opposed to an unknown afterlife, or that beyond the earth there is a metaphysical sphere.
Nina Carini starts from these functional definitions, and in her first reflections she explores semantic variations which can be reached only by working on the italian word confine (border), composed of the prefix “con” (with) and the noun “fine” (end), evoking associations of ideas that go beyond the purely descriptive form of the term, as in common usage. In this respect she talks about an end, indicating the void caused by the interruption of dialogue, or generated by silence, referring to that inconceivable destiny being the ontological limitedness of life, of which the human being, in his finiteness, becomes aware most of all when he is faced the eternal mistery of the metaphysical.
(…) Nina Carini finds inspiration for these topics in the work of a poet who, more than anyone else, managed to offer a lyrical interpretation (…). This man of letters is Rainer Maria Rilke, and Nina Carini quotes one of the first verses of the First Duino Elegy “Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe”, this way introducing the word “emptiness” – which for Rilke is a central linguistic espression, referred to an invisible space, inaccessible to humans and populated by “angels” (…).