Ada is Van's first love. Van is Ada's first love. They are sweethearts, but also brother and sister. Ada and Van are both similar and totally different: their love ranges from the uttermost narcissism to the most violent and cruel outbursts. They live on Antiterra, the twin of our planet, where the Earth is a myth and every art form a game. After eighty years, Ada and Van are still together, and they disappear together like something fading away. Van tells the story of his love on the basis of the book of memories. They are martyrs of time, lying on their metaphysical bed, and unable to die, not even at the end, at the inevitable end of the work which they themselves compile from their own lives.
This story can be found in Vladimir Nabokov's novella Ada or Ardour: A Family Chronicle. Reading Ada is a challenge, a purely erotic gesture of searing contrasts between reader and author. The story is revealed in precise and layered notes, quick intuitions. The Italian Fanny & Alexander company is tackling this story. Ardis I is the first of seven stopping points in Ada or Ardour: A Family Chronicle where the group spends some time. This first stop is Eden, where Ada and Van meet for the first time, the lost and impossible home of an obsessive myth that now gleams out, to both Nabokov and Fanny & Alexander. The company considers that this stop has a peculiar and specific nature, a sort of entrance, an allusive room, an enigmatic place called 'chamber cinema'.