Special program by Elisabetta Di Sopra
The Suspended Glance special program includes a video selection that this year will benefit from Enrico Tomaselli’s collaboration. He is the founder and artistic director of the Magmart festival, but also curator and cultural management expert.
Tomaselli curated several video art exhibitions across Italy and presented selections abroad, in collaboration with Napoli Film Festival, Gaza International Festival for Video Art, COMICON, Fonlad Festival, Art Video Exchange, Oslo Screen Festival, Videoakt, Plataforma de Artistas Chilango Andaluces (PLACA), IVHAM, Konvent.0, Fadjr International Festival of Visual Arts, Biennale Mediterraneenne d’Art Contemporain d’Oran, just to mention a few.
He is the designer and curator of the Macro-scopio project, a series of thematic seminars about videoart which are presently on at the Macro museum in Rome. He also writes articles regarding cultural policies and contemporary art for the Wall Street International, FreakOut Magazine and Medium.
For the 9th edition of the Short Film Festival the body still remains the undisputed protagonist of videoart, presented under different perspectives depending on whether you are a male or female artist. Women talk about women, men about men. More glamourous and self-referential the former, more experimental and technical the latter. Two perspectives, two different worlds of images and sounds which manage to co-exist and interact.
Elisabetta Di Sopra
May Revolution
Director: Francesca Bonci
Synopsis: I wanted to convey the feeling of uneasiness that transforms into gloomy alienation, but eventually becomes light through an intimate introspective experience.
Profile: Francesca Bonci collaborates with bands and musicians from different countries. Not a filmmaker in the usual sense, but a 360° artist who is experiencing an inner artistic evolution that take her to experiment videoart, using analog and improvised instruments which only later she shapes into digital material. Videos that look like visuals, decontextualized, saturated and deep colors that become part of the music, noise, interference, visual backgrounds for live shows. Moving pictures, emotional expressions, color of sounds. I carry my visual artistic career focused on the emotional impact through visual manipulation of film material.
Pneuma (triptyque)
Director: Antonello Matarazzo
Synopsis: Pneuma analyzes the threshold between immobility and transformation, highlighting the slow mutation of an ancient olive tree. The warping of the face and the winding wooden formations are a metaphor of the life-force power in an organic forms of powerful symbolic value, absorbed into the relentless cycle of nature, where everything changes and nothing is destroyed.
Profile: Antonello Matarazzo is a painter and video artist. Since 2000 he has combined moving pictures with “still” ones taking part in many festivals (Mostra Cinematografica di Venezia, Festival CinÈma MÈditerranÈen Montpellier, Torino Film Festival, Festival des CinÈmas DiffÈrents de Paris, Invideo, Locarno). Some of these events, such as the Festival de Cine de Mar del Plata in Buenos Aires, Mostra del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro and Signes de Nuit in Parigi, have presented retrospectives exhibitions of his works. The link between painting and video is the marked inclination to explore introspective and anthropological aspects. This specific feature means that in many universities, such as in Brera, Roma 1, Genova, Pisa and Cambridge, his works are shown as educational tools during seminars and workshops. His work was exhibited during the 53rd and 54th Editions of the Venice Biannale of Art.
The burning
Director: Francesca Fini
Synopsis: The burning is a video inspired by recent disturbing political events taking place in America, which ignited a series of images in my mind. These images are centered around the idea of obliteration of the past and of human progress. However everything is set on fire one night, the flames devouring our disbelief, leaving us dismayed.
Profile: Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist mainly interested in the new media, in experimental cinema and performance art. She lives and works in Rome. The body and its narrative power are always placed at the center of her works, inserted in a sort of exuberant “multimedia pot” where live videoart pieces are mixed with generative audio, lo-fi technologies and homemade interaction design devices, with handicraft masks, bizarre costumes and feminist steam-punk props popping out everywhere. Among the most important art events she took part in we have to mention the 2011 WRO Biennale in Poland, and the River-to-River Festival in New York. In 2015 she directed in Rome the first edition of HI> DANCE Festival, dedicated to contemporary dance and technology.
Avant la nuit
Director: Chiara Caterina
Synopsis: A short reflexion on a prison in the centre of a European capital city: at sunset, the time of the day when things may seem possible. Before night falls, prisoners are called out by their identification numbers and their voices seem to perfectly intertwine with an abstract dimension, which gives shape to an imaginary new life.
Profile: After completing a degree in film studies at Rome University, Chiara Caterina (Salerno, 1983) obtained a diploma in cinematography from the Film Academy in Rome (former NUCT (Nuova Università del Cinema e della Televisione). Since then she has been working between Italy and Belgium mainly producing documentaries and art projects. In 2008 her photographic project ì”isioni Multiple” (Multiple visions) was selected to be presented at the FotoGrafia International Festival in Rome. Her short film Avant la Nuit won the prize for the Jury at the Festival Cinema Zero 2013, Trento (Italy) and the first prize awarded to the works of the experimental section at the “A corto di donne Festival” (Naples) in 2014. The work was also presented at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival, at EMAF (European Media Art Festival) in Osnabrueck and at VIDEOFORMES: Festival d’Art Video et Cultures NumÈriques in Clermont-Ferrand, to name a few.
Blackpainter
Director: Elena Tagliapietra
Synopsis: The infinite profiling of a fascinating image aims to achieve self-realization in society. But this promise not always turns into reality. The oppression of the extreme aesthetics on our ego can lead to the obscure involution of ourselves. A jungle of confusion and excesses in which the soul got lost
Profile: Elena Tagliapietra is an Italian artist who transforms human bodies into paintings by enhancing their unique identity. Through live performances, her painted bodies become the genuine expression of her ideas. The final process of her work is to re-interpret stories through photography, video and installations. This Venice/Milan based artist examines the symbolic relationships between human mind and natural environment, between traditions and culture. “The game is to isolate the content, camouflaging the alive container.”
Meandro rosso
Director: Paolo Bandinu
Synopsis: This video pays a tribute to the visionary insights of three great directors (D. Lynch, F. Fellini, D. Risi). through a pictorial interpretation of the visions themselves. On the basis of a non-narrative film language, the work aims to highlight the tortuous and intricate wandering through the maze of the mind.
Profile: Paolo Bandinu was born in San Gavino (CA) in 1984. He began his studies at the Art College of Cagliari in 2003-04 and graduated in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sassari. In 2011 he obtained his degree in Visual Arts and Multimedia Languages from the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. He lives and works in Berlin. His work moves through the pictorial stories that take shape on the canvas and evolve by means of a video editing where the constant evolution of painting shows every single gesture and sign. Painting becomes music and sublimates the motion of the matter. A succession of feelings and moods evolve into a situation that seems to freeze every change and indecision, maintaining the balance between what happened and what is going – or should happem.
Reverse metamorphosis
Director: Eleonora Manca
Synopsis: The suggestion given by Turritopsis Dohrnii, the potentially immortal jellyfish, is proposed to highlight the life cycle that characterizes every living being. At the same time, it underlines the wish for what we were about to meet during our “journey”. This is the way to trace a metamorphosis path, into the heart of the energy of what we were to “become”.
Profile: Eleonora Manca (Lucca, 1978). Video artist, videoperformer, photographer. Each of her works refer to the theme of metamorphosis and of the memory of the body. She lives and works in Turin (Italy).
Zero
Director: Igor Imhoff
Synopsis: Zero is the story of a primitive world plunged into darkness, where the figures restlessly wander in search of food. Sometimes these characters are predators, some others preys, constantly neutralizing each other in a violent way, thereby triggering a spiral of increasingly frantic fight right to the death.
Profile: Igor Imhoff was born on February 10th, /1976. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. He currently teaches Multimedia Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, animation and 3d modeling at the “International School of Comics”, post-production and rotoscoping at the Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking of Ca’ Foscari University. His artistic activity is mostly devoted to experimental videos, animation in film or in areas mostly related to art andexperimental films. Numerous have been the solo exhibitions and presentations during national and international festivals, such as the one at the “Bevilacqua La Masa” foundation and at the San Marco Gallery (Venice), at the Milan Triennale “A + A Gallery”, OCT Contemporary Art Ends Shanghai, Museu Belas Artes de Sao Paulo, Clermont Ferrand Film Festival, Festival de Annecy, and Animateka.
“Magmart – Video under volcano” is an international video art festival whose 1st edition took place in 2005. Over the past 14 years, the festival – which has recently become biennial – has been held 11 times (the latest edition is ongoing at the moment) involving 2600 artists from more than 80 countries, with more than 4200 videos. The festival has strengthened relationships, partnerships and exchanges with several other festivals around the world.
