Installation • Video Mapping • Soundtrack
AIDA — The Verdian Exodus
An immersive installation inspired by Verdi’s Aida, exploring the universal theme of exodus and migration.
Installation • Video Mapping • Soundtrack
An immersive installation inspired by Verdi’s Aida, exploring the universal theme of exodus and migration.
Client
Teatro Regio di Parma
Year
2024
Location
Galleria San Ludovico, Parma, Italy
Services
Original Soundtrack & Sound Design, Video Production & Video Mapping
AIDA — The Verdian Exodus is an immersive installation inspired by Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, exploring the universal theme of exodus. People of different ethnicities advance like marionettes guided by destiny, suspended between earth and sky, searching for an elsewhere that may not exist.
The work unfolds across five scenes — five emotional landscapes traversed by the migrants — each with its own visual and sonic identity. The entire project was created in Unreal Engine, featuring an original soundtrack composed specifically for the installation, projected onto the walls of Galleria San Ludovico in Parma during the 2024 Festival Verdi.
“Marionettes guided by destiny, suspended between earth and sky, searching for an elsewhere that may not exist.”
The journey begins in a vast, arid expanse where wind drags dust and memory across the land. The figures advance in single file, shadows against the horizon, each sealed within their own silence. The steppe offers neither shelter nor direction: it is the inner landscape of those who have left everything behind and have yet to find anything.
The sea opens like a wound between two worlds. An immense, deceptive expanse, it promises salvation and threatens oblivion. Bodies sway among the waves, suspended in a limbo of hope and fear. Crossing the sea is an act of blind faith, an involuntary baptism that marks the boundary between what one was and what one will become.
The landscape crystallises into a hostile stillness. Ice preserves and imprisons: steps slow, gestures become fragile. In this scene time seems to freeze, as if the migration could be suspended mid-journey. The figures move across cracking surfaces, caught between the sharp beauty of frost and the silent threat of sinking beneath.
The forest welcomes and disorients. Among trunks and roots the figures find a momentary refuge, but also the bewilderment of those who can no longer see the sky. The vegetation thickens, paths multiply and contradict one another. The forest is where exodus loses its trajectory and becomes wandering, where the outward journey transforms into an inward one.
The desert is the final trial, the place where every superfluous thing is consumed by light and heat. The figures proceed with the slowness of those who ration every gesture, every breath. The landscape is absolute: no landmarks, no shadows. At the heart of the crossing, the desert becomes a mirror: it reveals what remains when everything else has been stripped away.
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