In this video Marino offers us a collection of instants, a range of visual poems, one after the other. Emotions, gazes, bodies and details fill the screen and take us to our subconscious without loosing sight of the physical dimension of our reality.

Marino shot this video in Argentina, at different institutions for mental health patients and people with physical disabilities. In it he is clearly searching for that difficult borderline between innocence and desperation. Each small visual poem is preceded by a word that helps the spectator into a certain position from which to watch the video and predisposes her to a specific viewpoint from which to watch the images on screen. Following the word “Leg” we see a disabled man missing a leg, who, with the help of his crutches, walks along the long path waiting before him. A dog will cross his path on several occasions along the journey. The image is thereby impregnated with a sense of fiction, almost like a surrealist dream.

The aesthetic of these small and short poems (lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes) is principally black and white. Colour is only used to emphasise certain details and direct our attention to specific elements: in “Belcanto”, the first fragment of the piece, two female hands are taking things out of a vanity case, and only the lipstick will be shown in colour, in bright red.

Due to the great quality of the film, we will be able to notice the smallest details, textures and contrasts that turn reality into quasi-abstract images. This is clearly the case in “Meat”, in which it is impossible to make out which fragments of the human body are being shown on screen.

The title of the piece comes from a poem by T.S. Eliot, “The hollow men” of 1925. The soundtrack is made of silences and minimal sounds that have been put together by appropriating and distorting material coming from mechanical appliances, airplanes’ black boxes and nonsensical monologues. Marino works within the tradition of film experimentation and updates it to our times. Another version of In Death’s Dream Kingdom, in which the video is broken down into its fragments, is offered in the artist’s web site.