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KOLKATA: Italian Wave – a selection of video-art curated by FRANCESCA FINI

Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist mainly focused on new media, experimental cinema and performance art. She lives and works in Rome. The focus of her work is always the body and its own narrative power, but 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.

Curatorial Note

“My work as a videoartist has allowed me to know over the years, through festivals and exhibitions – in Italy but especially abroad – many Italian artists with whom I share materials, suggestions, methods and destinies. Recurring names that I often find next to mine in exhibition catalogs, Facebook events and press-releases. People that I meet for the first time – as it happened even too often – on the other side of the world. Then I smile and feel a sense of familiarity and respect; here is someone like me who carries on her/his work with absolute stubbornness, often against everyone and everything.

The videos that I have chosen for this Italian selection within Momentum Festival in Kolkata, are the works of the most interesting Italian artists that I have known over the years. These videos tell – with different languages ​​ranging from videoperformance to 3d animation – the infinite possible ways to be alive in this battered world, to renegotiate our relationship with the others, with our bodies, with the landscape, with that sense of loneliness and separation which often comes from the constant questioning we share in Art.”

 

Italian Wave programIn order of appearance – A selection of films from Italy

 

Francesca Romana Pinzari / I ain’t superstitious

A lonely bride walks through an empty church. None is walking with her and none is waiting for her. The pavement is made of mirrors that she crashes under her hills at every step. Italy is a very superstitious country, actions like crashing mirrors and get dressed as a bride not on your wedding day is bad luck. The lonely bride walks over traditions and superstitions and crash them under her shoes, by doing that she crashes her own identity by crashing her own image inside the mirror.

Elisabetta Di Sopra / Legami

A heart becomes symbolic place of emotions. Pierced by a red thread it represents all ties. We baste it with the people we love. Every time is an attack to the heart; love is unbreakable from suffering and the human condition to be vulnerable, prevents us from separating them.

Eleonora Manca / Reverse Metamorphosis

The suggestion given by the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, potentially immortal (it is reported to have a “reverse metamorphosis”, as it is able to revert to the stage of sea anemone, reliving backwards each stage of its metamorphosis, to develop again into jellyfish) was here chosen in order to highlight the life cycle of every being. At the same time, it supports a sort of “yearning” for what we were about to meet in our “journey”. Thus, a path of metamorphosis, into the heart of the energy of what we were going to “become”.

Alessandro Amaducci / I Am Your Database

You have only one life. In the videogame of life the final battle has begun, and the winner is already decided. Database of life, database of death.

Igor Imhoff / Kurgan

The meaning of kurgan is grave. In fact, here reigns feeling like a gravestone in a Scene deliberately hyper-realistic, made with a technique in 3D. In this context materialize the characters, ghosts, or rather of simulacra, who immediately opposed in a fight to the last ‘particle.

Gianluca Abbate / Panorama

Panorama is the first chapter of a trilogy on the city.

The video is a review on a polis that stretches away over an infinite global space with no more uninhabited places nor frontiers where we can take refuge. In this landscape we cannot see any way of readmission for those who have once been excluded, and this recalls imaginary worlds in search of a balance.

Debora Vrizzi / Frame Line

Frame line is a space between two frames, a line separating feelings from rationality, it represents the empty and still space of waiting. By revisiting Penelope’s myth, I want to underline the conceptual and physical density of emotions, the turmoil caused by a failure. Penelope weaves her hair like the spider its own net; the wind, now melting into the water, moves her dress in a seducing dance for the emptiness.

Chiara Mu / Decresce (Decrease)

Working around the concept of the Degrowth, as expressed by the economist S. Latouche, I made the point to consider how fruitful it might be investing our time into the oneiric state, instead of pushing each other into the inescapable spinning wheels of the super production, shamefully required today by the ruling capitalist system.