Inlaid in a postcolonial perspective, “Lo Sai?” (Were you aware?) is based on the comparison between academic culture and spiritual-material (or, better, cosmic) culture, wondering if they form a dichotomy or could be a pair.

The artwork is formalised through a double-channel video installation: one video focuses on the thoughts of philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Serres, while African oral narrations shapes the other video.

A level of construction of the narration makes use of different shooting and editing styles for the two videos, sharing the same length. The one referring to academic culture, shot in a university classroom, is a long take in which the cold photography and the fragmented audio between the ‘choir’ off-screen, a female digital voice, and the male actor’s voice on stage, comment on the assertive and diachronic tendency of that knowledge. The other video, shot in a mountain landscape, employs a coarse-grained photography style and conveys the immanence of the message through the plurality of viewpoints on the same subject. So, restoring the synchronicity of a universal knowledge conveyed by the words of the voice-over which will be revealed only in the final scene.

Research on the Ashanti culture and the production of Kente fabrics led De Marchi to choose them as silent protagonists, as a philosophical code language accompanies the verbal, media and environmental one. Selecting colours and patterns on the base of their meaning, she designed a piece of fabric and a stole, then produced in Bonwire (Ghana).

The installation included the Kente fabric and stole as well as the related drawings and paintings – poster colour on Ghanaian math notebooks – revealing the meaning of the message they embody.