Eventi
In the artist’s early film works, the staircase is used as a “device of power” and as a metaphor for an inexorable sociopolitical system that leaves no escape. Within this experimental body of work, which has been rediscovered and highlighted in part thanks to the “Art & Experimental Film” project of the Home Movies Foundation, Eventi represents the culmination and the most explicitly political chapter of the cycle. Returning to the idea of the infinitely looped event that was already at the heart of the artist’s first film, Silent Invasion, in Eventi she replaces the anonymous staircases of his previous work with the grand staircase of the Milan Palace of Justice. Along its steps, Berardinone makes a black sphere bounce, evoking a ball and chain, shifting the focus from the indeterminate space of his earlier works to the public and monumental setting of the judicial institution. Amid the political fervor of 1970s Italy, the work explicitly reveals the nature of the staircase as both a stage and a hierarchy of state power, institutional and social, which deprives bodies of effective freedom of movement.