Planes cut through the sky, coming and going between sea and land; the calm of a summer afternoon is disrupted by a roar. Perhaps a tragic event is unfolding. It could be a war, but it’s not—it’s simulated, like on a video game screen. The colors are saturated, and the movements accelerated. In reality, they are simply firefighting aircraft in action. Simonetta Fadda follows their path with the video camera, later editing the footage across four channels. Wargames (2004) is one of two video installations and light boxes that make up the exhibition Reality Show. The other is Stargate. A pier on the sea, a gate to nowhere, a sign forbidding passage beyond—where there is only water. An ambiguous, timeless image. The only movement of the camera is a zoom that slowly pulls back to reveal an abandoned industrial remnant.

Since 1992, Simonetta Fadda has worked on telecronache, using the video camera to record marginal or barely visible events within the urban landscape. By eliminating narrative formulas and the construction of visual metaphors, the artist faces reality without adding any meaning to it, with the neutral approach of one who avoids strong direction. She works in “live broadcast” mode—though in low definition. Frayed and shaky, her images are far removed from the sharp clarity of television standards. The reality that emerges on screen is unrecognizable and disorienting. The televisual “washing” transfigures it. Through the use of low definition and intervention on the essential components of video language—sound, color, image density and resolution—Simonetta Fadda once again unmasks the presumed objectivity of the reality show, of television commentary, and affirms, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, that every linguistic choice is conscious and therefore potentially ideological. Combining the analytical and metalinguistic vision of artists like Nam June Paik with the counter-information experiments of the 1970s—using amateur video to follow events more closely and from below—Simonetta Fadda creates telecronache that transform into a pulsating body of visual and sonic stimuli. She explores the medium’s potential beyond narrative possibilities, constructing a chronicle using the visual grammar of low definition: what we see is what is happening, transfigured into image.