REAL_ITALY

ALTERAZIONI VIDEO

INCOMPIUTO – THE BIRTH OF THE STYLE
2017-2018

VIADOTTO MUSSUMELI
2018

MANIFESTO INCOMPIUTO
2006-2020

UNTITLED
2020

UNTITLED INCOMPIUTO 5
2019

IF MY LIFE
2019

COMITINI
2019

For over ten years the artistic collective Alterazioni Video has narrated the phenomenon of unfinished public buildings in Italy, investigating the relationships between them and the context in which they are inserted in a multi-disciplinary way, affirming their artistic value and thus proposing a new stylistic definition. The realisation of a photographic atlas of these incomplete works, in fact, has enabled the collective to outline an architectural style sui generis existing throughout Italy. Incomplete works are places of a collective memory: born as ruins and produced from a compressed time, they are architectural buildings that shape the landscape and represent a cultural and artistic heritage, pushing us to question ourselves on the dynamics of progress, on its limits and failures, while recognizing its unusual and powerful aesthetic value.

1. installation: 100 giclée prints on fine art paper, iron lectern, photo folder
   Courtesy: Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palermo
2. blue back poster
   Courtesy: Alterazioni Video
3. prespaced vinyl on wall
   Courtesy: Alterazioni Video
4. video, 8 min
   Courtesy: Alterazioni Video
5. with Virgil Abloh
   print on steel
   Courtesy: the artists and Campoli Presti, Paris
6. deckchair, brick
   Courtesy: Alterazioni Video and Dispari, Reggio Emilia
7. stampa incorniciata
   Courtesy: Alterazioni Video and Dispari & Dispari, Reggio Emilia

The installation Incompiuto – La nascita dello stile was created thanks to funding from the Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Associazione culturale Incompiuto Siciliano, Riposto (CT)
Permanent location of the artwork
Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palermo

YURI ANCARANI

SAN VITTORE
2018

San Vittore is the second film in Yuri Ancarani’s trilogy which also includes San Siro (2014) and San Giorgio (2019). In the three works, Ancarani’s gaze reinterprets the stadium, the bank and the prison as places of the community, places made of a shared rituality, of relationships between people, of bodies in motion that dialogue with architectural space. In the artist’s works, built on perceived atmospheres, antinarrative images, shots that suggest scenarios and sounds that open to the imaginary, it is contemporary man in the darkest sides of his daily life that is being investigated. In San Vittore, the artist captures the penitentiary, focusing on the condition and relationship of the children with their detained parents. In particular, his interest is concentrated on the former, on how they live through and perceive the controls, searches, imprisonment during visits to parents. The prison is thus recounted by Ancarani, who for this project dialogued with the Bambinisenzasbarre association, through drawings made by the children.

DCP, colour, sound 5.1, 12 min
Courtesy: Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli
Permanent location of the artwork
Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli

GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ

ANASTASIS | ΆΝΆΣΤΑΣΙΣ (HEILIG GRAF)
ANASTASIS | ΆΝΆΣΤΑΣΙΣ (ANNUNCIATION)
2018

Anastasis | άνάστασις is a monumental intervention created inside the oldest religious building in Amsterdam, Oude Kerk (Old Church). Inspired by the historical events of the conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism (1566-1578), Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s project develops a reflection on the processes of iconoclasm that still accompany radical religious, political and social changes today. Through the application of red filters to all of the church’s windows, an expanse of glass with an area of 1600 m2, the interior of the building was flooded with a saturated red light, similar to that of a darkroom. On 23 September 2018, the last window that remained unchanged in the chapel of the Heilig Graf (Holy Sepulchre) was replaced by a window which was also red. The photograph (Heilig Graf) frames the empty niche illuminated by this window. Use of the red filter, in addition to creating a formal link with the intervention in the church, acquires a symbolic meaning because red light in the analogue photographic processing preserves latency or prevents the development of images. On the contrary, the large photograph of the Annunciazione is the result of an impression made by contact, namely by making adhere the photosensitive paper on the stainedglass windows survived to the iconoclastic fury. It represents the forerunner moment of Christ’s birth while the (Heilig Graf) the last one of his life showing the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre that originally housed a sculpture of the deposition.

photographic print on silver-salts baryta paper and red non-attinic filter
Courtesy: La Triennale di Milano

12 photographic impressions on silver-salts polythene paper made by contact with stained-glass windows
Courtesy: l’artista / the artist

The photography and the Anastasis | άνάστασις (Heilig Graf) stained glass window were realized partly with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Oude Kerk, Amsterdam
Permanent location of the artwork
La Triennale di Milano

LEONE CONTINI

THE MISSING HORN
2017-2018

Il corno mancante is a flow of searching given rhythm by various performative actions that took place between Milan, Palermo and Stuttgart, and by two ritual interventions in July 2018 at MUDEC – Museo delle Culture in Milan and on Monte Stella, an artificial hill created with with the debris generated by the aerial bombardments of the city during WW2. In the summer of 1943, a British incendiary bomb hit the site of the ethnographic collections of Castello Sforzesco in Milan. Many artefacts were burned, others were lost in the rubble of the collapsed building. The sculpture of the Conqueror of Death (Yamāntaka) from the Qing Dynasty was among those recovered, albeit mutilated: his left horn is still inside one of those spiralling hills covered with green, which seem to transcend both the history and the geography of the place. The video recounts Contini’s search for the missing horn. Such an impossible search is felt by the artist as an occasion for symbolic recomposition not only of artefacts that were removed from their original contexts during colonialism (and later destroyed during a war between European powers) but also of a plural and united society.

installation: 16:9 video transferred digitally (colour, sound), rubble, drawings, variable 32 min 07 sec
Courtesy:the artist
Courtesy for the video: MUDEC – Museo delle Culture, Milano

The video and the performative actions that accompanied the search process were made possible thanks to funding from the Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Viafarini, Milano
Permanent location of the artwork
MUDEC – Museo delle Culture, Milano / Milan

DANILO CORREALE

THEY WILL SAY I KILLED THEM
2017-2018

Diranno che li ho uccisi io is a project dedicated to the Cinema and to its role in defining the 20th century society. Through the reconstruction of never realised Italian film scripts, Danilo Correale investigates current issues such as colonialism, feminism, class differences, the Italian Terrorism and religion. The video follows the reflections of a solitary archivist (Ernesto Mahieux) while navigating a timeless bureaucratic space, like in a stream of consciousness or in a dream. Immersed in this place, the public is guided through fragments of stories that follow one another: a choreographed introduction that takes inspiration from La ballata degli angeli assassini [The Ballad of Killer Angels] by Claudio Caligari, Un dio nero un diavolo bianco [A Black God, A White Devil] by Sergio Spina on Italian colonialism, the vicissitudes of the Red Brigades narrated by Dario Argento and taken from La brigata inesistente [The Imaginary Brigade] by Augusto Tretti, the life of Simone Weil in Lettere dall’interno [Letter from Inside] by Liliana Cavani and that of St. Joseph of Copertino in A Boccaperta [Mouth Wide Open] by Carmelo Bene.

full HD video, anamorphic, sound, 35 min
Courtesy: MART – Museo d’Arte moderna e contemporanea di Rovereto e Trento

series of 6 pencil drawings
map on vinyl
Courtesy: the artist

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Careof, Milano
Permanent location of the artwork
MART – Museo d’Arte moderna e contemporanea di Rovereto e Trento

NICOLÓ DEGIORGIS

LE BARON CHÉPER
2017-2018

Le Baron Chéper (a play on words of the French title of Italo Calvino’s book Le Baron Perché/The Biron in the Trees) is the result of a period of residence spent by Nicolò Degiorgis in Grenoble as part of the programme: Politique de l’hospitalité. Programme de résidence située. The photographs analyse the migratory situation of the French city and in particular of L’Arlequin and La Villeneuve neighbourhoods. These districts, built between the 1970s and 1980s in a peripheral area of the city, were designed as places in which to put social experiments of ethnic mixing into practice and create a sense of community through the active role of citizens. Today real ghettos, these contexts of urban segregation recount a wider problem of integration, which is dramatically topical in Europe. Degiorgis’ eye is focused on capturing the intensive architecture of the suburbs and the nature that surrounds them in the evening light, when the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods abandon urban spaces and live those that are domestic and private.

20 photographic inkjet prints on baryta paper
Courtesy: Museion, Bolzano

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
École Supériore d’Art et de Design (ESAD), Grenoble
Permanent location of the artwork
Museion, Bolzano

FLAVIO FAVELLI

IMPERIAL SERIES (ZARA AND RSI)
2018

Flavio Favelli’s work focuses on two stamps of the Serie Imperiale (Imperial Series) produced during Fascism, one in 1944 by the Italian Social Republic and the other after September 8, 1943 in Zadar, both with overprints. At the Casa del Popolo in Bazzano and in a former Coop supermarket (places rendered on display by virtual reality headsets) Favelli enlarged the stamps by creating two site-specific murals measuring two metres by two. Later, as for an ancient fresco, he detached them from the wall and transferred them on canvas. “The purple-coloured stamps of the Kingdom of Italy, Imperial Series, with the faces of royalty on my grandfather’s desk, represent a labyrinthine story of light and shadow, where truth and lies, justice and iniquity are intertwined with both household things and those of the country’s history.” The central theme for the artist is the existing and inextricable relationships between past and present, between personal story and collective history, bringing the current Italian situation to come to terms with a dramatic and not distant past.

diptych, enamel paint on wall with cement mortar transported onto canvas, 2 VR headsets
Courtesy: Fondazione Rocca dei Bentivoglio, loc. Bazzano, Valsamoggia (BO)

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Associazione culturale Nosadella.due, Bologna
Permanent location of the artwork
Fondazione Rocca dei Bentivoglio, loc. Bazzano, Valsamoggia (BO)
currently on loan at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna

ANNA FRANCESCHINI

CARTABURRO
2018

Through the parts that create Anna Franceschini’s installation, CARTABURRO explores the large and eclectic artistic and theoretical oeuvre of Carlo Mollino (1905-1973), architect, designer, photographer and artist, bringing out the heterogeneity of the discourses that are its basis and the variety of cultural interests. Franceschini’s project, which makes use of research on the cinematographic language that the artist has been pursuing for some time, consists of three videos inspired by the formal dynamics of the works of the Turin architect, where flowing and organic lines allude to the female body and its performativity. Scenographic structures, moving images and objects activated in a mise en scène compose the installation’s complex arrangement. The result is a multimedia exploration of the psychological and social implications of Mollino’s gaze towards the female body – made explicit by his Polaroid format portraits of female nudes – and in the more general context of the history of moving images.

CARTABURRO (props teatrali) tenda di velluto liscio carta da zucchero, luci e filtri per luci
installation: two 16:9 videos and one 9:16 video transferred digitally (colour, silent), 3 iron structures, 3 ULTRA HD LED screens
CARTABURRO (theatrical props) smooth blue velvet curtain, lights and light filters
Courtesy: GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Associazione culturale Almanac Inn, Torino
Permanent location of the artwork
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

EVA FRAPICCINI

WORDS WITHOUT ACTION POISON THE SOUL
2017- ongoing

The work conceived by Eva Frapiccini is the result of a participatory project that involved historical archives and study centres on the mafias, family members of victims, schools and libraries in Palermo and the rest of Italy, in a path of research on some of the protagonists in the Antimafia movement between the 1970s and 1990s. The approach chosen by the artist focuses on the intimate dimension of the work of magistrates, journalists, trade unionists, police inspectors, or common citizens who spent their lives fighting the mafia. Through photographic documentation, the project highlights the everyday tools (notebooks, speeches, registers and diaries) collected and kept in many private archives. The installation is therefore an archive in progress that is accessible and searchable, inviting the public to delve into the everyday life of these individuals.

48 photographs and 48 frames, 6 joined wrought iron structures, pigment fine art print on Hanhemühle Photo Matt Fibre paper,
fir frames, iron structure
Courtesy: Musinf – Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, dell’Informazione e della Fotografia, Senigallia

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institutions
Associazione culturale Connecting Cultures, Milano
Associazione culturale Isole, Palermo
Permanent location of the artwork
Musinf – Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, dell’Informazione e della Fotografia, Senigallia (AN)

ALICE GOSTI

HOW TO BECOME A PARTISAN
2017-2018

Come diventare un partigiano by Alice Gosti – trained dancer and choreographer – premiered as a five-hour site-specific performance, the second chapter of a project in progress inspired by the history of the Italian Partisan Resistance. The performance was presented at CAOS – Centro Arti Opificio Siri in Terni with four Italian and three American performers and a double musical accompaniment: Terni’s choir, singing traditional partisan songs, and a polyphonic choir performing specially composed vocal and music arrangements. For Gosti, the Resistance movement stays relevant through time, capable of transcending the specific reality of Italian history and speaking to citizens of the whole world because increasingly “we must actively continue to fight for democracy and a political discourse, which is still conflictual and problematic.” The artist’s approach is ideological and at the same time centered on both intimate and shared themes such as collective resistance or the choice of self-organization for surviving.

Video documentary of the performance on 9.06.2018 at CAOS in Terni (10 min 50 sec), wooden box with study and illustrative material about the performance, fabric sculpture (drawing by Deborah Trout, installation by Sandford&Gosti)

Courtesy: CAOS – Centro Arti Opificio Siri, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Aurelio De Felice, Terni
for the sculpture, Courtesy: the artist

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Indisciplinarte, Terni
Permanent location of the artwork
CAOS – Centro Arti Opificio Siri, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Aurelio De Felice, Terni

MARGHERITA MOSCARDINI

THE FOUNTAINS OF ZA’ATARI

INVENTORY. THE FOUNTAINS OF ZA’ATARI.
HOUSE 90, BLOCK 1, DISTRICT 12
AL ZA’ATARI REFUGEE CAMP, MAFRAQ GOVERNORATE, JORDAN

The Fountains of Za’atari is an inventory of courtyards with fountains built inside their homes by residents of the Syrian refugee camp of Za’atari in Jordan. The theme behind Margherita Moscardini’s project is the right to the city, that is, if the camp is rethought as a city rather than a temporary settlement, facilitating the resident’s ability to organise him/herself in a community which regulates and moulds the material environment according to his/her needs would mean realising another idea of citizenship based on the condition of exile rather than territorial belonging. In Za’atari, the artist collaborated with a group of local professionals creating a mechanism for selling models of of the courtyards with fountain to European institutions which, by paying royalties to the Syrian designer, undertake to reproduce them as sculptures in public city spaces. To be activated as fountains (on show the one created by Hussein Mahmoud Al Uqla), a procedure is applied to the sculptures by which they acquire the legal quality of extraterritorial objects and spaces, maintaining complete autonomy from the national sovereignty of the occupied soil.

61 drawings, gold leaf, pure pigments on paper
Courtesy: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia

4k video document, no sound, 52 min 14 sec

soil, sand, synthetic resins and bronze
Courtesy: MADRE – Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Napoli
Courtesy: Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma e Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia

The sculpture Inventory. The Fountains of Za’atari. House 90, block 1, district 12, Al Za’atari Refugee Camp, Mafraq Governorate, Jordan was realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma
Permanent location of the artwork
MADRE – Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Napoli / Naples

LUCA TREVISANI

224
2018

DREAM REPUBLIC
2018

Dream Republic is a chemical reaction, the cultural terrain of which is the legendary Grand Hotel Et Des Palmes in Palermo, where writer Raymond Roussel lost his life in 1933. The place chosen was the room in which the French poet spent his last weeks – room 224 – and the reagents were the artists and the international authors from different disciplines, backgrounds, attitudes and knowledge, invited by Trevisani to sleep in that same room. They were photographed in a completely spontaneous way while building a unique and special silent dialogue with their bodies and their stories, a sculptural monument dedicated to peace, sleep, to the ability to place an enchanted look on what surrounds us. Dream Republic developed within the project/platform Raymond, a choral tribute to Roussel, orchestrated by Trevisani, unfolded between May and November 2018 in the private and common spaces of the Grand Hotel. Over the months, artworks, interventions, actions, passages, and subtle and liminal gestures followed one another, then collected in the book Via Roma 398. Palermo, inspired by the mystery surrounding the writer’s death.

2k video, sound 5.1 sound editing: Lorenzo Dal Ri, music: Michael Kresna
Courtesy: Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Palermo

20 giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, framed
Courtesy: Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Palermo

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Fondazione per l’Arte Onlus, Roma
Permanent location of the artwork
Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Palermo

PATRICK TUTTOFUOCO

ZERO (WEAK FIST)
2018

The light sculpture by Patrick Tuttofuoco is a sign, a zero expressed by the closed hand in a relaxed position, with the thumb in contact with the tips of the other fingers. The image refers to that of an unarmed Doryphoros, taken from Hellenistic statuary tradition: the release suspended between tension and relaxation of a semiopen fist is read by the artist as a welcoming, inclusive gesture, allusive of human doing and his vita activa (active life). ZERO (Weak Fist) was created as an intervention of urban art, a joyful and at the same time looming presence in relation to the monumentality of the historical places where it has so far been presented: the Arch of Augustus in Rimini, the courtyard of the Italian Embassy in Berlin and Porta San Donato/Zamboni in Bologna. At MAXXI it is set up for the first time inside an exhibition space, in dialogue with the architecture conceived for the Museum by Zaha Hadid. Tuttofuoco’s work is therefore a non-violent gesture insinuated between strong architectures and with its green light marks the persistence of a critical thought.

installation: neon light and steel
Courtesy: Museo Nazionale di Ravenna, Polo Museale dell’Emilia Romagna

Realized with the contribution of Italian Council, 2017

Promoting institution
Polo Museale dell’Emilia Romagna
Permanent location of the artwork
Museo Nazionale di Ravenna, Polo Museale dell’Emilia Romagna