Of the Same Nature

The video of Alma Africa begins with a light.

It is the warm glow of an amplifier's valves: analogue, imperfect, almost alive. It pulses with the drums and the fretless bass, which look for each other without ever crowding each other.

One voice enters.

The other steps back.

Between them, space remains.

Then the camera steps back too, and the room reveals itself.

It is almost empty. An amplifier, a bass, a few dark surfaces. Beyond the glass, though, the sea takes up everything.

The waves rise in the night. Far away, a lighthouse crosses the dark with its intermittent light.

Its signal seems to answer the valves.

One light is near, built by human hands.

The other is distant, lost at sea.

Both are calling.

Two Words, an Entire Journey

Alma Africa is built almost entirely on two words:

Alma. Africa.

Alma is a name, but it also means soul.

Africa is a continent, but it also becomes origin.

The challenge of the song was to leave the words almost unchanged and hand the music the task of transforming them: moving them from distance to memory, from fear to recognition, as I told in The Song Began from the Bass.

Something similar happens in the video. Since the lyric does not narrate, it is the images that have to build the context, suggest the relations, and fill the space the voice leaves open.

But I did not want to depict a simple return. There is no one who leaves, reaches the past, and then comes back to the present. The movement of Alma Africa is deeper and less linear.

It is the discovery that past and future were never truly separate. That the origin is not only behind us. It goes on existing in the body, in memory, in the matter we are made of.

Understanding this brings vertigo.

Every border that falls carries fear with it. Not because there is necessarily a danger, but because something we believed far away suddenly becomes intimate.

Alma does not yet know whether she is finding a part of herself again, or losing the shape she had before.

The House

At a certain point she reaches a house.

It could be the house of her childhood. It could be a memory. It could be only the place memory built in order to be walked through.

The house is abandoned.

Alma hesitates at the door.

Then she goes in.

The rooms have kept time without managing to hold on to life. The surfaces are bare, the objects still, the air suspended.

Alma reaches a light switch and stops again.

For an instant it seems impossible that the light could come on.

Then it does.

A tungsten bulb lights the room with the same warmth as the valves of the amplifier.

The past answers the present through light.

Not everything is revealed. Only a small liveable space opens in the dark.

And it is enough.

The Tree

Fear is what stuns first.

What can come afterwards is compassion: not pity, but the recognition of fragility. The moment we stop judging what we have been and learn to stay beside it.

In the video, this passage lives in the scene that matters most to me:

Alma embraces the tree of her childhood.

The tree does not speak.

It does not give time back.

It promises nothing.

It stays.

The trunk carries the marks of the years. The roots stay invisible, yet they keep holding together the earth and everything that grows above it.

The scene comes from a gesture I really saw many years ago and never forgot. I did not want to reconstruct it, but to keep its truth: the naturalness with which, for an instant, every distance between a body and what surrounds it can disappear.

Alma is not embracing a symbol.

She is embracing something that went on belonging to her even while she was away.

The gesture does not say: this was part of my past.

It says:

This is still part of me.

The Light in the Mirror

Inside the house, the light reaches Alma in front of a mirror.

Her face appears in the glass and, for a moment, the different places of the video seem to overlap.

That is when the opening space reveals its own meaning.

The room is not empty.

It holds only what is necessary.

The light of the valves, the light of the old bulb and the signal of the lighthouse are no longer separate things: they are the same continuity, seen from different distances.

Of the Same Nature

Alma's first single, the one that carries her name, held a question: what relationship exists between consciousness, matter and artificial thought? It is the question this trilogy started from, in The Origin That Asks to Be Heard.

In Alma Africa the question turns back toward the origin.

Consciousness can build instruments, rooms, glass and languages. It can watch the sea and believe itself separate from what it sees.

But the sea keeps moving inside it.

The roots keep working beneath the surface.

The lighthouse keeps sending its signal.

This is why the video does not end with a conquest.

It ends with a recognition.

Alma does not reach her origin.

She understands she never left it.

My soul, of the same nature.