02 Moving Image

The Rise of Dino Desica – 2018

Introducing Dino Desica: artistic ambition, failure and everyday life as performance

The Rise of Dino Desica marks Dino Desica’s first appearance within Norman Mine’s practice. Developed over four years, it follows Dino through casting calls, temporary jobs and repeated Jobcentre visits as he tries to justify his ambition to become an artist and performer. Drawing on Italian Neorealism, the work places artistic ambition within everyday realities of work, money and uncertainty. Recorded largely on a mobile phone, candid encounters sit alongside constructed situations, blurring documentary observation and performance.
Rather than presenting Dino as a completed character, the work captures his gradual emergence, with failure, repetition and economic instability becoming part of his construction.

Concept, camera and editing: Norman Mine
Performance: Dino Desica
Year: 2018
Duration: 13 min 30 sec
Shot on: Mobile phone

Selected screening:
Tenderpixel Gallery, London, 2018

The Rise of Dino Desica introduces Dino Desica, a fictional actor whose ambition to become an artist develops within the very real conditions of precarious work, economic instability and repeated failure.

Filmed over four years on a mobile phone, the work follows Dino between casting calls, temporary jobs and recurring visits to the Jobcentre, where he repeatedly has to justify his determination to pursue a creative life. Rather than treating these experiences as obstacles outside the artwork, they become its material.

Drawing on the legacy of Italian neorealism, The Rise of Dino Desica works with ordinary locations, real encounters and the economic conditions of everyday life. The camera is often casually or discreetly positioned, allowing situations to unfold without a conventional script and creating uncertainty around what is documentary, what is performance and what has become fiction simply through being framed by the camera.

Failure is not presented as the opposite of artistic success. It becomes a productive strategy through which Dino constructs himself. Each rejected audition, temporary job and institutional encounter is absorbed into the mythology of a character who continues to behave as though his life is already a performance.

The work establishes a methodology that would become central to the continuing Dino Desica project: everyday life becomes a stage, lived experience becomes artistic material, and the attempt to become an artist becomes inseparable from the performance of becoming one.

Shot on mobile phone by: Norman Mine
Edited by: Norman Mine
Performer: Dino Desica

Selected screening:
2018 – Tenderpixel Gallery, London