Cavallo di Lavoro (Workhorse) is a stop-animation film counter-narrative. The work is built around meta-stories evocative of features of the economic, social and industrial history of Castelfranco -Veneto (North-East Italy). Through allegorical u-turns, roundabouts and dead-ends, the workhorse canters through the historical legacies of the region, from the medieval city’s silk trade heydays through to the industrial sprawl of today.
The horse, as a representation of mobility, might and strength, has in a way always been the life-force of the economic growth of this area. Most economic activity here today is still driven by ‘horsepower’: be it the car engine, forge, mechanical plant, train or aeroplane. The human body mimics the equestrian body: organic masses that share the same fallibilities and fragilities when putting to work, into the fields and into the factories. Over-worked, laden and burdened, eventually put out-to-pasture.
The tempo of this animation is set to a constant beat that echoes the repetitive cantering of a horse, of a churning barrel, of a spinning carousel and of a rotating wheel. It pulls the viewer across surreal and uncertain terrain made up of pathways, railway tracks and roads, through processing plants, corridors and stairwells. The narrative does not reach a breaking point but rather evokes work patterns, lifecycles and in situ maintenance which enable the machine to turn. Sigmund Freud’s ‘death drive’, the uncontrollable impulse is to do, to repeat, to reproduce compulsively, something that seems to be engrained in bloodlines here.