Private Project

Elephant in the room

Elephant in the room is a video project produced in February 2019 during the Guwahati Research Program- an artist residence program curated by Microclima in Assam, north-east of India.
The video, shot inside Dudul Chowdhuri’s house in Guwahati, involves the owner himself eating a meal together with one of the elephants living in his property. Her name is Monimala and she is a 26 years old female elephant.
The Elephant in the room is an expression commonly used in the anglo-saxon countries that refers to the image of a group of people having conversations in a living room and being indifferent to the surprising presence of an elephant. This expression reports an evident criticality that anyone wants to discuss. In order to distance oneself from pain, frustration and unease each person refuses, more or less consciously, to give substance to a fact and to recognise the proven validity of a statement. On a social level, this attitude may pertain an entire community and it is adopted at the presence of social taboos, embarrassing situations or specific social and political issues.
The decontextualized presence of the female elephant sharing a meal with Dudul in the living room is evidently in contrast with the metaphoric expression that epitomises an ignored or minimized truth, even though it is unquestionably cumbersome. In the video, instead, the elephant’s existence is emphasized by the attention put on it. The man-made environment of the living room appears as one very bio-diverse in which the extraordinary joint presence of these two subjects lies in their natural and everyday connection.

  • Edoardo Aruta
    Director
  • Edoardo Aruta
    Writer
  • Miroclima (Venezia)
    Producer
  • Dudul Chowdhuri
    Key Cast
  • Monimala
    Key Cast
  • Matteo Stocco
    Video Editing
  • Thomas Nadal Poletto
    Video Editing
  • Guido Modanese
    Post-production and Mastering Audio
  • Stefano Scattolin
    Post-production and Mastering Audio
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Elephant in the room
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 48 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 13, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    Assamese
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Talent Prize 2019
    Rome
    Italy
    October 31, 2019
    October 31, 2019
    Finalist / Talent Prize 2019
  • Casa Capra
    Schio (VI)
    Italy
    January 18, 2020
    January 18, 2020
    Video Installation
Director Biography - Edoardo Aruta

Edoardo Aruta (Rome, 1981) lives and works in Venice. He studied at Rome’s Belle Arti Academy and at Venice’s IUAV University. He has worked as a scenographer and costumer in theatre and cinema. His research focuses on the study of the languages of art and on how they are determined according to the relationship that a man has with space and the social context that accommodates him, using the artistic act as a mean to make a cognitive and explorative experience of the given environment. Such exploration brought him to include various types of languages in his practice, from the more classical approaches of sculpture, to installation, photography, video and the creation of alternative spaces.

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