A special program by Elisabetta Di Sopra.
For the tenth edition of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival 2020, The suspended glance, the programme about Italian video art by Elisabetta Di Sopra will include an anthology of works whose common thread is the use of the techniques attributable to animation. Silvia Grandi, Professor of Contemporary Art History at Bologna University and curator with Renato Barilli, Guido Bartorelli, Alessandra Borgogelli, Pasquale Fameli and Fabiola Naldi of the Italian Video art Annual Report Yearbook, chronologically selected some video art works which somehow retrace the roots of experimentation and tactfully explore all the commercial products that are a product of the extraordinary digital progress. Taken from the Yearbook’s 2006-2013 archive, the special includes works by Rebecca Agnes, Giovanna Ricotta, Blu, Diego Zuelli, Virginia Mori, Audrey Coianz, Michele Bernardi, Marco Morandi, Laurina Paperina and Rita Casdia.
REBECCA AGNES
A Short Trip in the Other Side of the Galaxy
2005/2006, 6’40”
A figurative journal of a curious trip in an imaginary galaxy. Inspired by the biological science fiction tradition and finding simple but interesting formal solutions, Agnes offers an inverted visualisation of many of the typical realities which characterize life on earth. Huge floating pods which are either colonized by alien bodies or are growing buildings within glass bubbles, as well as moving plants and other curious “characters” in the space take part in the attempt to differently visualize some fundamental aspects of the biological life.
Music: Jermozero
Born in Pavia in 1978, Rebecca Agnes lives and works between Milan and Berlin. She graduated at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2001, and is engaged in making video animation, graphic and illustration works. She has taken part in important solo and group exhibitions, in venues of great relevance including “Galerie Davide Gallo”, Berlin; “Lu.C.C.A. – Lucca Center of Contemporary Art”, Lucca; “Fabbrica del Vapore”, Milan.
BLU
Fino
2007, 2’50”
An essential and confident stroke, almost tracing that of artist Duchamp, in a debut which identifies in a machine (bachelor?) the opportunity to give life to a flying creature, free and naïve to the point of t instantly falling prey to the unavoidable web of the lethal spider.
Blue is the pseudonym of an Italian artist who has chosen to hide his true identity. He was born in Senigallia and presently lives in Bologna; he has been an active street artist since 1999, very likely considered as one of the most celebrated writers of all time, whose works are visible worldwide and his style easily recognizable. His creations are known to be “murals on an epic scale”. The artist turns the human figure upside-down, giving life to weird creatures which express their fears and awkwardness of the humanity. In these works a critic forcefully emerges against the excess of violence, religion, the citizen-slave of the media’s cage and the uselessness of wars.
GIOVANNA RICOTTA
Bamboolychees
2006, 4’10”
Intervention within the framework of Openspace, exhibition-itinerary curated by Laura Facco and Alberto Zanchetta and diplayed at the Center Candiani in Mestre (Venice). Paths of geometric accuracy directed to the individualization of fluctuating vegetal plants step into the monochromatic essentiality typical of the first approaches to video graphic. An infinite space characterized by rare evidence of decoration.
Born in Loano (SV) in 1970, Giovanna Ricotta graduated at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 1994 and rapidly established her reputation as an artist and performer, presenting her works in renowned Italian exhibition venues. The body is the real focus of her aesthetic research, which evolves to the point of incorporating media- video, photography, design- until it reaches a formal completeness that brings her pieces to be real “multimedia works”, characterized by a strong interdisciplinarity.
DIEGO ZUELLI
Colli malati
2007, HD video, 3d computer graphics, 1′ 34”, loop
One hand of “divine” dimensions caresses the mountains surrounding the town of Santa Sofia (FC), hit by strong earthquakes in 1917 and 1918. Conceived during a workshop with Anne and Patrick Pourier.
Born in Reggio Emilia in 1979, Diego Zuelli mainly works with the video and the tools of computer graphics. Through his modus operandi the infinite possible combinations of the synthetic image become a tool which he uses to explore the existing and the way we perceive and re-elaborate its manifestations. Such artistic process also involves the history of art, cinema and photography. In addition to such artistic activity, he teaches 3D computer graphic and animation in various Italian public and private institutions; he also works in the field of commercials.
VIRGINIA MORI
Il gioco del silenzio
2009, 5’
A disquieting identity crisis generated by refusing any form of contact and support. An award-winning video, selected in various international festivals, made by a thousand original illustrations through the traditional drawing on paper technique.
Virginia Mori, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and Italian illustrator, was born in Cattolica in 1981. She presently lives and works in Pesaro. Her works, usually in monochrome, stem from her ideas and are created by her strokes with the help of a BIC pen, an apparently simple technique but extremely refined, which allows her to stop her pictures in an instant. Mori’s images are rich in metaphors and symbols, as the artist herself states, inspired directly by dreams or at times visually transposed, with the lightness of her stroke, from situations that have really happened. The technique of mixing f unconscious fears and feelings with a surreal imaginary makes Mori’s work perfectly recognizable.
AUDREY COÏANIZ
Cut /// Fixe
2011, 7’
It is a short film which reflects how we live and remember the territory. «It was shot and produced- states the artist- in a French city under the Alps, Annecy. Purpose of this work was to lead the spectator to consider the perception of space, the one we live and the one we feel and perceive. My artistic approach is based on a composition and decomposition of images, as well as on different pictorial and formal representations which describe different realities».
Audrey Coïaniz was born in Île de la Réunion in1978, graduated at école des Beaux Arts in Marseille and specialized in Space Design. She lives and works between Bologna and Marseilles. As visual artist, she develops a search intended to investigate the concepts elapsing body, space and movement, working on animated photography as a base for films and live installations. In live performances, she works on the manipulation of materials and creates abstract and dreamlike landscapes. Her favourite technique is digital painting used in videos. It is a very attractive technique which offers the artist the possibility to create a series of animated frames, transforming simple video shootings in very expressive sequences, working particularly on blending the manual with the digital.
MICHELE BERNARDI
Djuma
2012, 3’50”
The wild boy and the pack of wolves. Grown up in the forest, on the fringes of an old abandoned metropolis, young Djuma runs towards that black hole of haze, foil and cement. A run through the blue sky streaked with clouds, crossing trees that thin out towards the boundary of the woods. On the back of one of his four-legged friends Djuma hurries towards the city he wants to set fire to, letting the monster disappear in the flames. A purification ritual to celebrate the urgency of freedom and the supremacy of nature.
During the ‘80s, Michele Bernardi worked for the TV series Pimpa, created by Altan, and for different episodes of La Linea di Cavandoli. He made various animation videoclips for Tre allegri ragazzi morti, Le luci della centrale elettrica, Prozac+, 24 Grana and others. He also collaborated with the cartoonists Maicol & Mirco and Igort. In 2018 his film Mercurio won the prize for best short film at Animaphix International Animated Film Festival.
MARCO MORANDI
We move lightly
2012, 5’
We Move lightly by Dustin O’Halloran (Robert Lippok-Pataphysical Remix): in Marco Morandi’s opinion this minimalist music indicates the constant quest for something in such an insensitive and barren world, which at the same time is also full of bright suggestions, displaying the origin of animal life by transforming the bulky figures of cetaceans into elegant and graceful shapes.
Marco Morandi was born in Cotignola in 1978. After he graduated in cinema at the University of Bologna, he worked for a few years as a video operator before specializing in 3D animation. He then moved to Berlin where he discovered the world of video art, interactive installations and production of musical videoclips. Back to Italy, he settled in Milan and added short institutional documentaries to his his video production, combining the activity of director and artist. He exhibited his works in different group expositions in Italy and abroad. He currently lives and works in Milan. He made the docufilm L’Albaràz nell’isola in 2016 for Primola.
LAURINA PAPERINA
How to kill the artists
2013, 6’
In her project intitled How to Kill the Artists (started in 2007), Paperina pays a distorted tribute to stars of modern and contemporary art such as Picasso, Marina Abramovic and Takashi Murakami, killing them with her work. Murakami, for example, is eaten alive by one of her sneering flowers while Abramovic is performing. The aim of her implacable abuse is a wild sense of humor, a comment on the contemporary forms of media and a successful attempt to shed light on the far too serious demand of today’s art world. In spite of their horrific actions, her characters are disarming and full of spirit.
Laurina Paperina (1980, Rovereto, Italy). She lives in Duckland, a little town of the Universe. She exhibited her works internationally, including group exhibitions in private galleries, art foundations, museums and public spaces. In addition, she has participated in festivals and art exhibitions. Working mainly with the imaginary of contemporary heroes, Laurina Paperina makes fun of art and life in her paintings, drawings, installations and humorous animation works. She describes herself as “a duck with a human head and viceversa (…) who doesn’t want to do serious art”. Her cartoon caricatures are used to ridicule the personal importance of the artistic action as well as politics, religion and pop culture.
RITA CASDIA
Stangliro
2013, 4’10”
The idea of this video originated after watching the movie Metropolis by F. Lang. The images by Lang- states Casdia- made me think about the representation of the crowds characterized by an impetuous and unidirectional emphasis which opposes the impotence of the person who does not follow this force. In Stangliro, the conflict between the “collective body” and the independence of the individual remains unsolved because none of the two options prevail, highlighting the defeat both of them are destined for: the collective body generates no creative force and the individual element obtains an emancipation that manifest itself through the conquest of its incomprehensible language.
Born in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (Messina, Sicily) in 1977, Rita Casdia lives and works in Milan. Through video animation, drawing and sculpture, she explores the emotional worlds suspended halfway between dream and reality, inhabited by small plastic dolls that live or “relive” in places where the artist had lived during her stay in Canada, Spain and France. The artist herself defines her work as a concrete and deep analysis of the soul cruelty, because the possibility to make visible the sentimental/emotional sphere dominating the rational life of all human beings, turns out to be an irresistible challenge.
