A R S I

Nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud is, as far as I know, the only artist to have abandoned art and fame at the height of success in order to seek refuge in the real world, taking on a real job and retreating to another continent, far from the “foolishness” connected with art and poetry. The A R S I video takes these circumstances into consideration, as well as our contemporary situation in which art is a real job while reality is, in many cases, a heap of foolishness.
The ultimate adolescent poet, Rimbaud, a gas station attendant in this video, reads A Season in Hell, his most famous work, over the course of a single night.
I believe that the work’s autonomous meaning lies in the experience of waiting: waiting for art to reveal its treasures; for youth to pass into adulthood; for night to turn into day; and finally, in pushing the viewer’s patience to the limit, for this reading to reach its conclusion.
The title A R S I is an acronym formed of the poet’s initials and the name of poem being read in Italian. It is also the past participle of the Italian verb ardere (to burn, to be ablaze), and therefore: I burned, they burned. Taken as a whole, it is a paraphrase of the essence of artistic experience, according to Romantic canons.