A special program by Elisabetta Di Sopra
The 14th edition of the Short Film Festival will see the conclusion of the recognition of performance video works from the Videoart Yearbook Archive made between 2012 and 2023. Thanks to the invaluable collaboration of Silvia Grandi, professor at the University of Bologna and co-founder of the yearbook, it was possible to access an archive that boasts more than four hundred videos collected over the course of the sixteen editions of the festival. Thanks to an important partnership project, the archive will become accessible at MAMbo in Bologna in order to spread the knowledge of the Italian video research of the last twenty years to a wider audience.
In video performative works, the body exhibited by the artist becomes a public and private space at the same time, where one can share one’s tensions, ideas emotions. However, to what extent is art an instrument of communication and to what extent instead does it turn into a mechanism of retention? Dario Lazzaretto tries to answer by returning a self-portrait of himself that becomes sound. Like Dorothy Gale, Francesca Fini faces her journey, but the path is full of pitfalls. She will have to bring all her acrobatic skills into play to keep her story in a balance between meaning and symbol, politics and art, peace and war. In Alzaia(S), Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo are inspired by Telemaco Signorini’s 1864 painting L’Alzaia, and denounce a society that continues to construct the most perfect of illusions by casting a blinding light on what must be seen and confining in the cone of a shadow the things that must remain hidden. For Virgilio Villoresi, his arms become streets and his hands pages on which to write the title of his short film inspired by Mario Mariotti’s photo books. Lucido, by Giovanna Ricotta is a eulogy to madness and the desire to overcome one’s limits by seeking perfection. In Filippo Berta’s collective performance, we witness the vain attempt of each individual to stand out by emitting an increasingly intrusive, increasingly chaotic noise. In Shãn (“mountain” in Chinese) Sabrina Muzi places man in relationship with the landscape. Two bodies, the human and the mountain’s, resonate. The climate and ecological crisis, post-pandemic contemporaneity and, more generally, the present are the issues that inspired Think Tomorrow is the End of the World, by Elena Bellantoni – a performance that evokes Andreij Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. There is no solution in Christian Niccoli’s Zwei, where two men hanging at either end of a rope are bound by a mutual dependence with no possibility of a common way out. How does one live inside a monochrome world? Red by Salvatore Insana invites us to experience a red universe. In Family Portrait, the passage of time and affections is represented by the dust deposited on the body of artist Debora Vrizzi, which is blown away by the members of her family. Finally, Elisabetta Di Sopra’s The Care. Love that is care and polishes caress after caress, even people like us, who act. Not only it says to the other: you end here, but it tells us you begin here.
Videoart Yearbook together with Lorenzo Balbi announces the concession of the archive to MAMbo in Bologna, an important partnership project focused on increasing the value of more than four hundred videos collected during the sixteen editions that will help to spread the knowledge of the panorama of Italian video research of the last twenty years to a wider audience.
VIRGILIO VILLORESI, Fine, 2012, 2’
Virgilio Villoresi’s latest short film starts from the end, a short and commissioned work. It opens up with inscription on a hand containing the title and unfolds entirely, including the opening and closing credits, on the hands and with the hands of Villoresi himself. Painted hands that interact with small objects, arms that become streets, flags that become crosses. The technique of painting on hands was a thunderbolt for Virgilio after discovering the photographic books of Mario Mariotti, an extraordinary Florentine artist, who died in 1997. Mariotti started in the 1960s to produce an endless gallery of anthropomorphic phantasmagorias capable of enchanting all kinds of audiences, and continued for more than 30 years to do so.
DEBORA VRIZZI, Family Portrait, 2012, 3’23”
I sit, dusty, at a table. My family, standing beside me, blows away the dust that has settled on my body. The family that feeds us and devours us. We enjoy this dual aspect, foundation of love, contradiction without solution. I speak of the passage of time and affections.
GIOVANNA RICOTTA, Lucido, 2012, 8’
Lucid is a work that emphasizes, in its synthesis, a moment of passage, a eulogy to madness and the desire to achieve perfection, analyzed through the body of ballet: the barre. A work dedicated to the constraints imposed on us or created by us and the will to overcome them by finding and accepting one’s own identity and limits. The performing body represents a ballet dancer, who will not wear a traditional ballet dress, but a straitjacket as if it were a ballerina uniform, redesigned for Lucid.
FILIPPO BERTA, Concert for Soloists #2, 2015, 2’57”
Performance realized at the Italian Embassy in Berlin, Germany. A group of men is drinking some broth while sitting at a table in the Italian Embassy in Berlin. Each emphasizes each sip by sucking forcefully from the teaspoon, so as to make an intrusive noise. Each individual manifests his or her presence during the act of eating through this gurgling noise coming out of his or her mouth, but finds himself or herself inexorably absorbed by a collective chaotic noise. They all try to distinguish themselves from this collective uniformity (the same plate, the same dress, the same chair…), but it is a futile attempt and the result is a parodic competition in which everyone tries to prevaricate to emerge and distinguish him/herself from the others.
DARIO LAZZARETTO, Humble self-portrait of a sound artist, 2016, 2’35”
In many cases, artistic expression provides the artist with a valuable filter to process the surrounding reality, as much as a way to explore the ideas and emotions the artist feels inside before communicating them to the outside world. What is still unclear to me is to what extent art is a tool of communication and to what extent it turns into a retention mechanism, instead….
“…all I can say is sound.
Sometimes it’s a little stuffy
but out there the air is rarefied and sickly
and such discipline becomes the filter and the chain…”
FRANCESCA FINI, The Yellow Brick Road, 2017, 4’05”
Shot in Jerusalem, Yellow Brick Road is the final scene of a long cinematic journey to the city of the three monotheistic religions. A journey that the artist has transformed into the adventure of a Dorothy Gale novel in the Emerald City, in search of the great and powerful Oz. A sparkling journey that turns into a slippery path that the artist must cross without falling. “In Jerusalem I feel this way, just like Dorothy Gale who has to face her mysterious journey – but my path is full of pitfalls. It is not easy for an artist working with symbols to to deal with a place so full of contradictory signs. The risk is to fall into the intolerable banality of art with the ‘message inside,’ but at the same time, the choice to avoid any provocative reference could have produced something too weak, so I had to put my acrobatic skills on the line and keep my story in a balance between meaning and symbol, between politics and art, peace and war.”
ELISABETTA DI SOPRA, The Care, 2018, 2’34”
Caring for the other when we present ourselves to life and when we entrust ourselves to death.
LEONI & MASTRANGELO, Alzaia (S), 2019, 4’15”
Alzaia(S) is an audiovisual reworking inspired by Telemaco Signorini’s painting L’Alzaia del 1864. “Our society is pornographic because it continues to construct the most perfect of all the illusions: it casts a blinding light on what must be seen, confining in the cone of shadow the things that must remain hidden, no longer wondering what is producing that void of light now all around us.
SABRINA MUZI, Shãn, 2019, 5’43”
The object of the work is the mountain (Shān in Chinese). Shān is an iconic image that, repeated like a mantra, is charged with symbolic power, becoming an emblem of an archetype and a witness to a place and its transformations. Two bodies resonate, the human body and the mountain body, setting the stage for a new perceptual investigation of the landscape.
ELENA BELLANTONI, Pensate domani è la fine del mondo, 2021, 5’50”
The climate and ecological crises, post-pandemic contemporaneity and, more generally, the present are the issues at the core of Think Tomorrow is the End of the World — a performance that evokes Andreij Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia — moves. During the intervention, twenty-nine young people move through space as destabilizing elements, as if they were ambassadors of the darkest omens about the fate of humanity. Here language becomes sprawling and collective, creating an alliance of bodies. Half human and half animal, these unknown entities call for a reflection on new social paradigms through collective, gendered and multi-species action.
CHRISTIAN NICCOLI, Zwei, 2022, 5’29”
Two men are bound by a mutual dependence, that is, they are hanging on either end of a rope that lies on a very high wall. They are thus in a seemingly eternal limbo, without really finding a common way out.
SALVATORE INSANA, Red, 2023, 5’00”
A mental vision, a perceptual experiment. The visual field transformed by color. Burning one’s eyes from seeing. A black, mobile stain within a red, homogeneous, dreamlike universe. A color of a solid, pulsating density, which presents itself as a narrative and not as a reference to the vast symbolic universe that has revolved around it for centuries. A body embedded within a monochrome, as elusive, agile, wounded, creeps nervously on the threshold, between waves of sonorous heat and sharp caesuras. Something imprints itself on the retina, something that lingers, sparing and reappearing, without reference to a definite space-time present. How does one live inside a monochrome world?
