Alex Cecchetti

Video 5’

2023 - 2024

The artist takes on the role of a mermaid, dancing through the currents, blowing kisses that draw hearts made of air bubbles in the blue of the sea. At times, he abandons himself to the oceanic drift, baring his teeth or seeming to scream in fury—only to return, again, to the dance. The only clue to a wider narrative is held in the title: Ariel’s Evil Brother.

Ariel, in the tale of The Little Mermaid, gives up her tail and even her voice for the love of a human prince. In Andersen’s original story, the prince falls for another woman, and Ariel, voiceless and tailless, dies alone of solitude. The metaphor is cruel: a woman surrendering her voice and her wild liberty for an unreturned love is an even deeper tragedy. 

Her brother is instead now dancing, swirling, quickly playing with the currents, sending kisses of bubbles, drifting and diving into the deep. Is he planning revenge? Luring Ariel back into the sea? Or just expressing the joy of existence?

Immersed in the infinite blue, his dance seems to say that to be ocean is to be vast, and that each life is not just a body but a choreography of a whole ecosystem. 

His dance is the oath of someone who still possesses voice and tail, someone who knows that the real spell is cast by those who do not surrender their song, but carry it—because their body still belongs to the infinite body of the sea.

To renounce a part of the sea is to renounce the whole sea. To cut a forest is to cut the world that breathes through it.

Video loop, 5’21”

Alex Cecchetti

2023

LULUYANA LAKE is a looping video work built around a single question: How much life is held in one breath?

The piece emerges from freediving in Luluyuan Lake, the sacred lake of the Tagbanwa people, where breath becomes threshold, rhythm, and a passageway to the deep marine world.

In these waters, Cecchetti describes an immersion so complete that nothing remained between the body and the lake, not even the skin itself.

Each day, a barracuda welcomed the divers, becoming a guiding presence, an animal psychopompe, not a companion of the dead, but of meditants crossing between worlds and states.

Here, breath, a gesture that seems to limit human life underwater, is presented instead as the possibility of becoming ocean. Through breath, the most elementary gesture of the living, the body enters a communion with the matter it traverses.

The body of the diver and the body of water move in the same space, where the coordinates are a hybrid of the two creatures: emotions, light, depth, pressure, temperature, thoughts, and sensation.

In this work, climbing the ocean equals climbing the depth, and descent and ascent coincide in a single internal movement of breathing.

LAC LULUYANA is not representation but participation: a tidal loop between the material and the immaterial, where breath becomes place, ceremony, and worldview.

Underwater Journals
14’ video loop
Alex Cecchetti
Ongoing since 2020

QUADERNI SOTTOMARINI is a visual diary born from breath-led immersions across the world’s waters. These are real diaries, intended as accounts of encounters, reports of meetings between species. A hypnotic deep dive into ecosystems inhabited by visions of corals, sponges, barracudas, whale-sharks, oceanic mantas, squid, and other living forms. It is a chronicle of presences, not observations from afar. These encounters are only possible because of the immense body of water the planet is made of.

The water breathes with currents and tides, and this breathing becomes the vehicle with which the diary drifts. From coral geographies to volcanic shores, the diary moves through distant waters, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, the Philippine Sea, the Andaman Sea, the Bali Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, and the Caribbean Sea, carried by the currents of the Western Pacific Ocean and the Indonesian Ocean.

Quaderni Sottomarini is not a collection of images, but a choreography of meetings, where these reports of encounters allow the viewer and the sea creatures to recognize each other in the same space, until both become Ocean together.

Video 5 minutes

Alex Cecchetti 2020

One day, a flower whispered to you that “If words are sound, and sound is air, it may be worth listening to the wind”. Then, like many other things in your life, you forgot.

I have tried not to forget the teachings of the flowers, and here they are, whispered as if it was the first time.

“If flowers open at the heat of the spring, what makes you think they don’t feel pain? If one single petal is more sensitive than an eardrum, and vibrates to every breeze or buzz, how many secrets hold the rose?”

Guided Tour of Heaven and Hell
Alex Cecchetti

Palais de la Découverte, FIAC PARADE,  20 October 2016

With poems by: Bill Knott, Erin Lindal Martin, Sylvia Plath, Nicanor Parra, Dorothea Lasky, Anna Akhmatova, Nichita Stanescu, David Berman, William Blake, Sandro Penna, Alex Cecchetti, Ariana Reines, John Giorno, Dante Alighieri

Special guests: Michael Horovitz and Vanessa Vie

Video HD double channel loop
Camera A: Alex Cecchetti
Camera B: Benoît Maire

Alex Cecchetti 2010

Two people filming their own image of the sun reflected in the sea water, at the same moment in the same place. Each person see in the water a different sun, there are many sun reflected in the sea as many viewers are watching, this is a well visual phenomenon related to the point of view of the beholder. But what happens when the two viewers start to dance a waltz? When they dance so close the reflections juxtapose and they may end up seeing the same sun.