Greta on the beach is a reflection of the human condition.
Immersed in the sound of the sea and the song of the seagulls, we witness the depiction of a muted, unexpressed, empty humanity, which can only light up in the cathartic moment of desire and imagination, nostalgia and dance. A landscape of everyday gestures (reading a book, playing cards, brushing one’s hair), loneliness, indifference and incommunicability – punctuated by the sound of the waves and seemingly eternal – is broken by moments when expressions of body and movement abandon reality to become metaphor, symbol, enigma.
Each of these moments is a picture in itself, an apparition that comes and fades as dreams and thoughts come and fade. Those same bodies, previously observed in their unchanging everyday apathy, are revived to become carriers of visions (they become fish, dancers, lovers, poets, murderers, prophets) and represent human feelings and drives (desire, frustration, rivalry, care, death, political passion).
Guiding us on this journey, suspended between dream and reality, are the apocalyptic words of Nevil Shute, the eerie and poignant words of T.S. Eliot, and the voice of Greta Thunberg, a voice that, while announcing catastrophe like the millenarians of the Middle Ages, nevertheless carries hope for redemption in its uncorrupted and incorruptible timbre, in the sensitivity that knows no compromise, in the courage of those who love courage and its horizons.