Listen to me, why is everything so hazy? — Mara Palena

Recontemporary, on the occasion of Olimpia Biennale of Contemporary Art in Alta Langa, promoted by Lunetta 11 and organized by the Unione Montana Alta Langa, presents Listen to me, why is everything so hazy?, a site-specific installation by Mara Palena, hosted in the Confraternity of San Sebastiano in Paroldo (CN).
The Confraternity of San Sebastiano becomes a space for the exploration of love — a threshold and liminal place: an intimate, immersive, and profound experience; a poetic testimony to temporality and transformation. The title of the installation is inspired by the song Lilac Wine by Jeff Buckley, originally written by James Shelton in 1950 and reinterpreted in numerous versions. The song tells the story of lost love and the resulting despair, evoked through the image of lilac wine that clouds reality.

With an intimate and poetic gaze, Mara Palena creates an immersive journey that weaves together video, sound, light, and atmosphere. As one walks through the nave, time becomes a living material — shaping bodies, permeating emotions, layering identity. It transforms, evolves, fades. Like the lilac wine in the song that clouds perception and dilutes reality, the installation moves through memory, layering, and disorientation, allowing time to guide the experience. The relationship with the gaze of the other is central to the process: a mirror in which we recognize or lose ourselves, a lens through which we change, a bridge that connects body, space, and identity. Love, like time, becomes a transformative, unstable, cyclical force.
The apse, once a space for prayer, now welcomes memory — inviting us to enter into dialogue with what was and what still resonates: the sound of a voice, an echo of love, a memory transformed. Within the Confraternity — a place that by its nature guards silence and memory — the work gains further depth: the threshold between visible and invisible, presence and absence, stillness and motion, becomes even thinner. Semi-transparent fabrics, fragments, layers, and memories combine into a sensory score that invites getting lost, finding oneself, listening, remembering.
Here, the body is not just a container but a living archive — a space of accumulated emotions, a place of memory and projection. Every gesture, every posture, every silence becomes a language.