Izzie Panasci
Izzie Panasci
What does a curb mean to you? Is it purely functional? A place to park your car, or step across, or perhaps stop to catch the bus? Do you ever think about how they are made? Or maybe examine their potential for sliding, grinding, or slashing? How you answer these questions depends entirely on your interests and experiences. Construction workers, architects, artists might be the kind of folk that initially notice a curb’s formal qualities and design. A skateboarder or rollerblader might instead observe that it has been worn down, waxed, and prepared for play. A concrete curb, just one single element amid an infinite urban landscape, is an essential and often overlooked construction of everyday life.
“Buscando” is the Spanish word for “searching.” My view of the built environment is a transient exploration and meditation. Buscando is a visual and auditory investigation of how my perspective as an artist, skateboarder, and San Francisco native coalesce and synergize to create new meaning for architectural elements like curbs, rails, and so much more. The camera transforms almost entirely into a disembodied eye, traveling, recording, and ultimately abstracting the textures and industrial materials of city architecture. The fluctuating sense of movement that audibly reverberates throughout the video is essential to understanding the intricacies and potential of the built environment. Deconstructing the physical realm around us, and attempting to reinterpret or repurpose it is an inherent part of the art-making process. Buscando is a layered, altered presentation of that experience.
My hope is to share the experience of searching and wandering through that which already feels acutely familiar in the urban environment. This ideology stems back to the core values and practices of the Situationist International movement. Specifically, Guy Debord’s writings on game-oriented behavior (one that has nothing to do with binary aims of winning and losing), his theory of “derive” (french for drifting), and “detournement.” His work has helped me to deconstruct and reframe my interest in the ways that humans relate to the architecture in their daily lives.
Concrete, wood, and metal architecture are the primary focus of this four-minute and 26-second video. The framework for this video is the construction and design of said forms and aims to explore more deeply how they can be manipulated or repurposed for unintended uses. From panning side to side, zooming in and out, and filming both quickly and slowly, the style emboldens and activates the static features of the built environment. Walking, running, skating, biking, rollerblading, and filming out the window of automobiles are the methods of transportation used to reframe the cityscape. The different pairings of transportation and filming styles illustrate distinctive ways that form and function of the built environment can compound and overlap. These results are manipulated and distorted further by the editing, which consists of a diverse range of speeds, scales, and timing techniques. These post-production alterations (like slowing or reversing clips, etc.) is a way to create specific and controlled commentaries on the cityscape. The frame within a frame is an example of how I utilize editing to create different feelings of motion, exploration, and texture.
Furthermore, each clip’s auditory and tonal elements directly correspond to an amalgamation of travel, speed, and material properties. The roughness of a surface, and the rate at which I cross it, has an inherent effect of creating a soundscape that feels both familiar and unique. Tangible elements of space are investigated thoroughly by a continuous, fluctuating sense of motion that ultimately constructs the soundscape for Buscando.
Sound, pattern, repetition, timing, and speed are the vehicles that give context to the wandering, disembodied eye guiding the viewer through the landscape. In a rich and fluid experience of motion, the cityscape transforms into a playground. The complex visual and auditory narrative of Buscando focuses and comments on aspects of the built environment in ways that words alone fail to do.
To learn more about Izzie's work visit:
https://www.izziepanasci.work