Out of Focus: installation

The environmental installation Out of Focus was presented inside the historic Church of San Marcellino during Divago Festival 2024 (September 26–29) in Genoa. The project emerged directly from a workshop on perception held during the preparatory artist residency leading up to the festival. This connection between collective research and final presentation was crucial: the installation was not conceived as a finished artwork imposed onto a site, but rather as a processual environment shaped by experimentation, dialogue, and the specific conditions of the church itself.

Choosing a sacred space was intentional. Out of Focus sought to question cultural models in which light is understood as a device of salvation. By stripping the church of its traditional iconography and extinguishing the celebratory brightness that usually characterizes Christian worship, the installation inverted its symbolic architecture. The result was a space accessible only at night, emptied of visual dominance, and transformed into a fragile, uncertain environment.

Inside, a thin mist blurred the perception of distances and surfaces, while a dim light allowed only fleeting glimpses of the church’s interior. A subtle soundscape — composed of distant voices, metallic echoes, and white noise — unfolded across the nave. These sounds resonated as both familiar and estranged, reinforcing the sense of suspension between recognition and disorientation.

On the floor, twelve DIY-style prints suggested possible pathways, echoing the reticulated grid of Genoa’s alleys just outside. Visitors were invited to wander slowly, cross invisible thresholds, and engage with the installation through embodied and subjective experience. Some chose to close their eyes and listen, others connected the printed words to create new semantic associations.

By merging darkness and threshold, Out of Focus produced a site-specific ecology of perception. The installation proposed the church not as a place of transcendence illuminated by divine light, but as a porous and generative environment where perception falters, meaning unravels, and new forms of collective imagination can arise.