Exhibition and performances

Haig Aivazian in his film Prometheus uses archive footage to juxtapose two events, both occurring in the early 1990s: the US technological and environmental assault on Iraq and the victory of the US basketball team, known as the Dream Team, at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Fire is the main narrative driving force: from the theft on the peaks of Mount Olympus to the deflagration in the oil felds of Kuwait. The film traces the long history of fire through non-linear associations.

Assisted by a team of professional animators, David Claerbout re-appropriates characters and settings of Walt Disney’s animated film The Jungle Book, freeing them from all forms of language and anthropomorphic references, in an operation of subtraction of human faculties. Instead of talking, singing and dancing, the animals go back to being bears, panthers and pythons, showing us a different methodology of listening, dialogue and representation of the living.

Filmed in Cherbourg in 2004, un crime retraces a true crime story reported by Le petit journal, a great newspaper of the 19th century, more than a hundred years ago. The video is a literal narration of the story: in each shot, the twelve actors carry the letters that make up the literary corpus. The actors are people from the city, which is in turn the set of the film. un crime tries to define the complex relationships that exist between object and word, narration and scenography. Colomer focuses on an investigation of physical space in its social and political complexity.

Alexandre Erre focuses on archives and traditions, drawing on his personal history, appealing to his language of origin and his diasporic present.

In Chaîne de montage we witness the paradox of fruits that are assembled by hand, as if they were products of an assembly line. A vision of a consumerist society in which, with a view to efficiency and profitability, we no longer have to wait for nature to develop at its own pace, in order to enjoy the harvest. Fingers and hands come to life, twisting and deforming to create each time a new exotic fruit where each miniaturized part is an element of an intelligible alphabet.
In the video Le radeau de la joie a group of people play on a raft adrift to the notes of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The subtext is a series of information about New Caledonia, taken from La notice à l’usage des futurs colons en Nouvelle-Calédonie (1930). The text dances on the screen to the rhythm of the impossible pirouettes of the young people on the raft.

MacGuffin is a research platform that explores the life of ordinary things. The editorial project examines the objects that surround us, using them as a starting point for analyzing the historical, social and political aspects they represent. The research conducted by curators Kirsten Algera and Ernst van der Hoeven flows into an installation dedicated to the thirteenth issue of the magazine, focusing on the role of the letter from the perspective of feminism, cultural identities, ecology and emancipation. From the pixel, the basic element of the digital letter, to the cultural impact of Arabic typography, MacGuffin No. 13 delves into the world of the alphabet.

Threshold takes up in its entirety an old Egyptian sci-fi film, The Master of Time, directed by Kamal el Sheikh in 1987. The film’s protagonist is an enlightened scientist obsessed with eternal life. Rania Stephan empties the Egyptian film of its fictional elements, preserving only the shots of entrances and exits through doors and gates. Despite the dissolution of the plot, enough fiction remains to make the narrative understood. The viewer joins the protagonist, Mr. Kamel, and remains stuck in space and time, fulfilling the scientist’s prophecy.

For unknown reasons, the Earth became flat. A researcher, apparently, recorded a film to investigate the mysterious flattening of the Earth that took place five years earlier. The film is divided into three chapters that seek to test our powers of observation and interpretation. The set, made by the artist, invites contemplation of what is happening on the screen, continually questioning the physicality of matter and its proportions. About Mirages and Stolen Stones plays with the viewer’s vision by proposing alternatives and speculations that prompt us to question collective narratives and established truths.

Sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, a camera pointed at her fingers scrolling through a document on a mobile phone screen. In the performance tù māma (mamma coniglio), Open Call winner Angela Xu reads a series of excerpts of texts in Chinese (her supposed mother tongue), Italian (her supposed acquired language) and English (the language of emancipation, learned later). Some passages are autobiographical; others are extracts from critical texts reflecting on the idea of translation, multilingualism, language in relation to identity, including Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others and Mirene Arsanios’s Notes on Mother Tongues. Angela accompanies the reading with delicate gestures, using a finger as if it were a paintbrush to represent Chinese ideograms in the air as they are enunciated. The presence of Angela’s voice and gestures is linked to the presence-absence of the selected authors, creating a polyphonic narrative that reflects on that ambiguous dimension of language in which personal biography and collective memory merge.

Angela Xu, Let Fortune Accompany You, 2023, performance. Video Sound Art 13th edition, MO.CA – Centro per le nuove culture, Brescia, 2023

In her performances, Marilisa Cosello analyzes and deconstructs social structures, reflecting on contexts characterized by the presence of rules. For Babel, the artist presents Replica, a research on the definition of identity in relation to social apparatuses. The group of performers, composed of students from the Arnaldo and Tartaglia-Olivieri high schools in Brescia, was invited to reflect on norms and institutions, observing contemporary archetypes and stereotypes. The socio-cultural installations are spatially represented by compositions of school desks: the scenography of the performance consists of object-modules arranged in variable shapes. The intervention is divided into four acts, visual metaphors for four institutions: family, school, work and politics.

The staging of iconic family portraits from the history of art – Family and Court of Ludovico II Gonzaga, 1465-1474 by Andrea Mantegna, Portrait of the Antinori Family, 1834 by Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Madonna of the Magnificat, 1481-1485 by Sandro Botticelli – is followed by representations of a school class, a work context, and a political judiciary. In the construction of the choreography, the students reserve the freedom to identify their own role within the performance. Although instinctive, the choices of individuals influence the outcome of the work, bringing out the necessary subversive element. This component of autonomy of the performers and their interaction with the surrounding space and objects are factors that contribute to challenging the rules of the present, instilling doubt in the dogma.

Andrea d’Amore for Video Sound Art Festival 2023 proposes the performance Masala wine, a convivial practice conceived by the artist in dialogue with David Claerbout’s work, The Pure Necessity, on show. The intervention is triggered by the Belgian artist’s full-length film, a reinterpretation of the classic The Jungle Book (1967): the narrative leaves the screen and expands into the room, generating a complete sensory experience. Visitors will be offered a hot drink prepared with garam masala (गरम मसाला in Hindi), a mixture of spices typical of Indian cuisine, the setting for Rudyard Kipling’s novel. The artist embodies Shere Khan, the tiger antagonist of The Jungle Book: the death of Shere Khan, which the artist imagines escaped, plays a fundamental role in the performance, which relates the fire to the punishment of the negative character. A new perspective on narrative is offered through a shared experience: an implicit re-evaluation of the tiger and Promethean hybris.

Andrea d’Amore investigates reality and its social and anthropological relationships through food, an expedient but also a medium in the construction of shared experiences. His research focuses on conviviality and conviviality – understood as a device for the creation of relationships around the preparation and consumption of food in a given space-time – where every element, human and non-human, plays a relational role in the fulfilment of a certain atmosphere. Its practice aims to constantly renegotiate its identity with that of the place, of the other, of otherness. The same theme has been explored by the artist in performances such as Forma de vida realised in 2022 in Mexico City, a reflection on economic and cultural relations in a highly globalised world; The Cartesian axes and fire, where in front of the heat of the fire and through the sharing of food people were invited to imagine future ecologies.