PROGRAMME LO SCHERMO DELL'ARTE 2020

by James Crump, US, 2020, 55’
vo: English; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

Jordan Wolfson is a controversial artist whose disturbing and provocative works elicit extreme reactions from both his critics and supporters. Through the use of technologies such as virtual reality, animation and robotic models, Wolfson’s works raise issues that affect contemporary society: homophobia, misogyny, racism, nationalism, anti-Semitism and violence.

by Rudolf Herz, Germany, 2019, 18’46’’
vo: German; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

German artist Rudolf Herz, who was invited by Harald Szeemann to participate in one of his exhibitions in 2003, involved the Swiss curator in his project Lenin on Tour, in which a gigantic sculpture of Lenin and two other Russian Communist heroes is transported by truck to various European cities. The film is a long interview and an intense portrait of the multifaceted and highly cultivated curator years after his death in 2005.

by Bruno Moreschi & Gabriel Pereira, Brazil, 2019, 15’
vo: English; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

Brazilian artist Bruno Moreschi and digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira have asked seven different types of artificial intelligence, usually used for the recognition of commercial images, to reinterpretate works of the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Among the findings, Moreschi and Pereira looked for glitches, errors and unexpected readings by the AI to understand if these could be a new way of interpreting art.

by Francis Alÿs, Iraq, 2020, 61’
vo: Arab, English; sub: Arab, English, Italian
Italian premiere

Belgian artist Francis Alÿs moves in the interdisciplinary space between art, architecture, performance and social practice. To film Sandlines, the artist worked in a remote village near Nineveh, Iraq, with a group of children who, as in a role-playing game, become characters who have marked their country’s history. Despite their country’s devastation, the children seem light-hearted and innocent while playing in the desert dunes.

by Serge July, Daniel Ablin, France, 2018, 52’
vo: French; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

In this documentary, well-known French artist JR traces his artistic career: from New York to Shanghai, from Palestine to the border between United States and Mexico, where JR intervened with his gigantic photographs, involving artists and inhabitants of the area in the belief that art can help change the world.

Duchamp Is Our Lawyer

Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

The curatorial collective Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, authors of the exhibition Hillary. The Hillary Clinton Emails (Venezia, 2019), and Kenneth Goldsmith, poet, critic, founder of the online archive UbuWeb, reflect on the storage, consumption and diffusion of works of art on the Internet.

by Musquiqui Chihying, Taiwan, 2020, 28’
vo: Mandarin; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

In this experimental documentar, Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying investigates geopolitical relations between Asia, Africa and Europe. In a succession of black-and-white images, the film portrays Xie Yanshen, a Chinese collector and philanthropist (director of the Private International Museum of African Art in Lomé, Togo), who recently donated part of his collection of more than 5,000 African artefacts to the National Museum of China in Beijing.

by Matondo Matondo, Belgium, 2020, 9’8”
vo: Lingala; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

What if Congolese masks and statues, imprisoned behind glass, could speak back? What would they say? In this essay film, Aimé Césaire’s sharp critique of Discours sur le colonialisme, published in 1950, is being translated for the first time in Lingala, the lingua franca spoken in north-west of Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Congo, in Angola and in Central African Republic.

by Romain Goupil, France, 2019, 52’
vo: French; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

This documentary is dedicated to Hans Hartung, a leading exponent of the European informal movement. The documentary’s narration is based on texts from his autobiography, together with interviews and footage shot at his house-studio near Antibes, where he lived with his wife, the painter Anna-Eva Bergman, which has become a foundation dedicated to their work.

by Flatform, Italy, 2020, 24’
vo: Arbaresh, Romanès, Griku, Byzantine Greek, Albanian, Yiddish, Turkish, Spanish, French and Salentino; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

History of a Tree is the story of the oldest oak in Europe. Around 900 years old, known as Quercia dei Cento Cavalieri, it is located near Lecce. This territory has long been crossed by migrations. The tree, a silent witness, has long sheltered travellers and pilgrims, and collected their stories.

by Thao Nguyen Phan, Spain, Vietnam, 2019, 16’40’’
vo: French; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

The Mekong River, which crosses six countries and supplies water to numerous fish farms and rice fields in Asia, is the main subject of this short film. The artist observes its changes, imagines its previous lives and reincarnations, retracing Vietnam’s past and questioning the Mekong’s uncertain future, its cycles altered by climate change and human intervention. The film is produced by Han Nefkens Foundation.

by Ben Anthony, UK, 2020, 53’
vo: English; sub: Italian

On the thirtieth anniversary of Keith Haring’s death, unreleased films from the Haring Foundation’s archives trace his life and work, intertwined with interviews with family members, artist friends and curators. The film is an immersion in 1980s New York’s underground scene: rap and graffiti merged with the new wave aesthetic. Haring’s accessible art was a figurative vocabulary that became a global icon, exhibited in public spaces. The documentary will be broadcasted on the television programme Art Night on Rai 5.

Flatform

in conversation with Silvia Lucchesi

The authors of the film History of a Tree in conversation with Silvia Lucchesi, director Lo schermo dell’arte.

by John Menick, US, 2020, 32’
vo: English, Japanese, Italian; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

Haunting is a found footage horror film: clips from fifty international horror films from the last seventy years, projected on two side-by-side screens. Realised during the lockdown, Haunting is also a response to the pandemic, in which domestic space has been transformed, for many, into a disturbing place.

by Emily Jacir, Palestine, 2019, 43’
vo: English; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

Artist Emily Jacir lives in Bethlehem, Palestine. Construction and military intervention by Israel have disrupted the geography and economy of the city, as well as the lives of its inhabitants. In this short film, Jacir launches an appeal to London research group Forensic Architecture to reconstruct the street where the house that has belonged to her family for over a century is located before Israeli soldiers requisition it.

by Janis Rafa, Netherlands, Greece, 2020, 91’
vo: Greek; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

Kala azar is Greek artist Janis Rafa’s first feature film. Focused on a young couple who work in an animal crematorium, the film is set in the countryside around a southern European city that the two young people drive through to recover the carcasses of animals. Their affectionate gestures shine light on what would otherwise be a dark existence in a desolated Greece, whose abandoned landscape bears signs of devastating economic and social crises.

by Simone Manetti, Italy, 2019, 79’
vo: Italian

On March 8, 2008, the artist Pippa Bacca left Milan with her friend Silvia Moro, both dressed as brides, to embark on their Brides on Tour trip / performance to Jerusalem. The performance involved hitchhiking, to bring a message of peace to war-torn, conflicted territories, but the trip ended in tragedy near Istanbul, where Pippa was brutally murdered by a man who’d given her a lift. Through interviews with her family, and thanks to the montage of materials filmed by the two artists, Simone Manetti’s film reconstructs the story, leading us into the depths of the Pippa’s work.

by Barry Avrich, Canada, 2020, 96’
vo: English; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

A documentary on an international thriller, the story of a huge contemporary art scam. The case broke out when two unknown collectors invaded the market with unknown works, later found to be fakes, which sold for millions of dollars at New York’s Knoedler Gallery, which has been in business for over 160 years. Made in Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian’s Queens home, many of these fakes allegedly by Abstract Expressionists such as Rothko, Pollock and Motherwell ended up in some of the world’s most important museums.

Commissioning Artists' Moving Images | Round Table

with: Beatrice Bulgari (Fondazione In Between Art Film), Han Nefkens (Han Nefkens Foundation), Mason Leaver-Yap (KW Institute for Contemporary Art), moderated by Leonardo Bigazzi.

Whether inspired by a specific theme or linked to a rigorous curatorial framework, commissioning is a fundamental process to support and develop the artists’ vision and their careers. In this round table we will discuss different strategies that were recently employed by three international institutions to successfully produce ground-breaking artists’ moving image works.

by Omer Fast, Austria, Germany, 2019, 24’
vo: Yiddish, German; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

In a mountain resort, a lone skier meets the ghost of an Orthodox Jew, who appears sitting next to her in the chairlift and tells her a Jewish fairy tale. The film is a representation of the relation between human and otherworldly, which pushes the viewer to reflect on his own beliefs and wonder if, as the title says, the world is a Golem.

by Eva Giolo, Italy, 2020, 8’42″
vo: Sound

The artist films a group of her female friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. The mechanical insertion of the filter over the lens thus becomes the simulation of a violent act, immediately changing the way we perceive and remember an action we have seen before.

by Iván Argote, Italy, 2020, 19’ 57’’
vo: Spanish sub: Italian

The Colombian artist films the inscriptions that have been posted around his neighborhood by Collages Feminicides, an anonymous collective of women artists who highlight the pervasiveness of gender violence and femicide in France. Over the collages, we hear the voice of Diana Rodriguez Franco, head of the city’s department of women’s affairs, charged with implementing public policies for preventing domestic violence and supporting victims. Interviewed by the artist, this official explains how the program Espacios Seguros was developed in response to the growing number of cases of domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

by Janis Rafa, Italy, 2020, 16’ 21’’
vo: Sound

In a series of mises-en-scène shot only in natural light, we see a domestic setting overrun by a pack of dogs that roam around restlessly, attacking objects and furniture. Historically symbols of loyalty to their master, the dogs here rebel and become the woman’s guardians, supporting and protecting her in the process of liberation from her persecutor.

by Adrian Paci, Italy, 2020, 11’ 38’’
vo: Italian; st: English

The screen is filled with a pulsating red that, for just a few moments, is interrupted by the appearance of an eye. A text written and performed by playwright and actress Daria Deflorian provides the narrative structure: the power of storytelling turns the absence of images into a dramatic space of listening that captures the audience.

by Anna Franceschini, Italy, 2019, 14’47’’
vo: English; sub: Italian

Made as a special and closing event of the Italian Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, in this film the camera moves and crosses the pavilion, which was partially adapted for filming, in frenetic circles. Sculptures and installations by artists invited to the pavilion – Enrico David, Chiara Fumai and Liliana Moro – have been freely interpreted by Franceschini.

by Dani Gal, Germany, 2020, 34’
vo: English; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

The film re-enacts three episodes in the history of avant-garde music. The events play against the words of an Israeli soldier about the violence carried out against Palestinian protesters. Tension pervades the film, between witnessing, silence, and listening, and leads to an unexpected reflection on dominant national narratives.

Anna Franceschini

in conversation with Milovan Farronato

The author of the film BUSTROFEDICO in conversation with the curator Milovan Farronato.

by Riccardo Benassi, Italy, Germany, France, 2018, 94’
vo: English; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

In this video essay, objects, 3D animations and textual parts make the artist’s thoughts explicit on the screen at several levels, in a continuously changing setting. Riccardo Benassi analyses technology’s impact on our relationship with space, reflecting on how technological devices have radically changed structures for living and organising reality, from architecture to politics, from cultural production to consumption.

by MASBEDO, Italy, 2020, 11’
vo: English st: Italian

The protagonist of Daily Routine lives in a bare house of glass and concrete, where just a few minimalist furnishings punctuate an otherwise empty space. From dusk into the night, her solitude is interrupted only by a sequence of ordinary actions that seem to have become routine. It soon becomes clear that the austere, see-through architecture is actually an instrument of control: everything is visible from outside, and a distant gaze seems to detect every movement taking place inside this structure of surveillance.

by Elena Mazzi, Italy, 2020, 13’30”
vo: English st: Italian

In the video Muse, Elena Mazzi leads viewers into the nightmare of gender violence through the disorienting beauty of the Greek and Roman statues in the Antiquarium of Palazzo Grimani in Venice. The video begins by showing details of the interiors as if they were still inhabited, while a voiceover ushers us into the private world of the person who lived, or perhaps still lives, in those solitary rooms.

by Basir Mahmood, Italy, 2020, 14’ 55’’
vo: Sound

For Sunsets, everyday Mahmood commissioned a production team in Lahore to create and film, in his absence, a repeated scene of domestic violence, based on his instructions and some reference images. The process of staging violence is what generates the images on the screen, but the act itself is almost completely hidden from the viewer. Rejecting spectacularization, the artist focuses instead on the cinematic process and the codes of its language.

by Silvia Giambrone, Italy, 2020, 15’
vo: Sound

Two characters, a man and a woman, who have absorbed this paradigm of violence into their own relationship, move in an evocative, poetic way through a domestic setting. They are always shown alone in that shared environment, as if each were a projection or memory in the other person’s mind, but the objects they use serve as tangible signs of their actual presence. The boundary between victim and abuser is so blurred that it becomes hard to say which is which; the whole video is pervaded by a tension that always seems on the point of erupting, having festered within the domestic space as well as in the psyche of the people who live there.

Mascarilla 19

Artists of the programme Mascarilla 19 Adrian Paci, MASBEDO, Elena Mazzi e Silvia Giambrone in conversation with the curators Leonardo Bigazzi, Alessandro Rabottini, and Paola Ugolini.

Mascarilla 19 is a project by the Fondazione In Between Art Film, that includes 8 artists’ shorts on the subject of domestic violence, how it has increased due to the pandemic and the resulting social containment measures.

by Virpi Suutari, Finland, 2020, 103’
vo: English, Finnish, French, German, Russian, Italian, Swedish; sub: Italian
Italian premiere

A documentary about the life and career of one of the great architect and designer Alvar Aalto and his first wife Aino, with unpublished archival materials. The couple’s iconic creations defined Scandinavian design. An exchange of letters between the two Finnish architects is alternated by images of some works by Aalto, united by the importance of light and a close relationship with nature, an architecture on a human scale.

by Basim Magdy, 2019, 14’18’’
vo: sound

In New Acid, a group of animals exchange text messages filled with GIFs and emojis. Their surreal dialogue is marked by irony and sarcasm that hint at conflict and rivalry among the species. This curious mix of meme culture and analogue film structure gradually reveals typical human behavior and the paradoxes inherent in a form of communication to which we have all become tragically accustomed. In 2019 New Acid was shown at 72 Locarno Film Festival. The film is part of the programme Around Coexistence, organized by Gucci Garden in collaboration with Lo schermo dell’arte that explores the complex dynamics involved in the coexistence of humans and the animal kingdom. The film was commissioned by La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France. Courtesy the artist and König Galerie, Berlin

Riccardo Benassi

in conversation with Andrea Lissoni

The author of the film Phonemenology in conversationwith the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich Andrea Lissoni.

PROGRAMME LO SCHERMO DELL’ARTE 2020