The Stream of Life, 2005. 3:53 minutes looped digital video with sound.

Silvia Malagrino’s The Stream of Life is a poetic visual exploration of time, memory and filmmaking. Loosely inspired by Clarice Lispector’s Roman Agua Viva, Silvia Malagrino’s The Stream of life assembles and synthesizes images derived from her film Burnt Oranges, photographs of x-ray’s of her own body taken during the seven-year period of creating Burnt Oranges, and a painting made with the Malagrino’s blood.

The Stream of Life is autobiography in movement. Malagrino circulates blood, words and images to evoke the question of Creation in the cycles and rhythms of time.

The Stream of Life opens with a camera movement pointing at faint blurred traces of red color, reminiscent of pigment paint running through a torn edge of a canvas. Also faintly, appearing on the surface of the screen/canvas, quoting Lispector, are the words “It’s with such joy. It’s such a Hallelujah!” Thus Malagrino recalls the pleasure of participating in the rhythms of creation with others through time and space. She traces the lineage of creativity invoking words and blood. She ends the piece with two clear and distinct lines of blood dripping on the side of the screen from top to bottom. The static camera records the real time of the drip. Real time, acceleration, fragmentation, interruption, continuum, the factual and the imagined, make The Stream of Life a provocative and kaleidoscopic affirmation of the process of creation and the circulation of art, history and memory.

Winner of the First Prize in New media at the 5th edition of the Florence Biennale, Florence, Italy.