14th edition

In the Arabic language, there are a myriad of terms to refer to the house: bayt, dar, manzil, maskan. Subtle semantic shifts that evoke the many meanings of dwelling, a word of the everyday that contains universes. Issue 4 of Arabpop (Tamu Editions), a semi-annual cultural magazine established in 2021 focusing on contemporary arts and literatures from Arab countries, is entitled CASA (an italian word that merges the meanings of “house” and “home”) and is devoted entirely to this theme. 
Continuing a series of well-established collaborations between Video Sound Art and independent publishing realities, a selection of textual and iconographic excerpts from No. 4 of Arabpop challenge the original format, becoming a site-specific installation inside Circolo San Luis that recalls the atmosphere of a home or reading room.
Selected contributions include: I’m Here, Laila Sit Aboha’s editorial, Carol Sansour’s Il Pollaio, Ines Abassi’s La Chiave, and Jasmine and Imad Barri’s photography project The Diaspora Archive.

You are not illegal, but you are not legal either. From this exchange between artist Arash Fayez and his immigration lawyer stemmed Apolis, a visual autobiography chronicling Fayez’s life in limbo between 2014 and 2018. The 312 pages comprise the artist’s immigration file in the United States, from his arrest to his voluntary departure from the country. Photographs of everyday life taken with a smartphone are “collaged” over sections of the dossier, concealing personal and sensitive information. This juxtaposition generates a multi-layered narrative: a tension between the faceless authority of bureaucracy and the distinctiveness of individual stories, between those who hold power and those who do not.
Born in Tehran and currently living in Barcelona, Fayez’s practice investigates notions such as dislocation, statelessness and suspension, both in his personal saga and in those of others. In the film I Can Only Dance to One Song, Fayez films people from migrant communities in Barcelona as they listen to and dance to a track of their choice, thus exploring the universal role of music in producing a sense of belonging and nostalgia for a place. Initially conceived as a one-channel film, the film is now presented as a 4-channel installation that disperses the polyphony of voices collected by Fayez, introducing an unexpected dialogue with the counter of the Circolo San Luis. 

The project was developed with the contribution of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).

The house is not a neutral territory, but a space imbued with invisible cultural connotations and meanings – and gender is one of them. In Semiotics of the Kitchen, an iconic feminist video and performance piece published in 1975, artist Martha Rosler takes on the role of an aproned housewife and parodies a television cooking show. Standing in a kitchen, surrounded by refrigerator, table, and stove, she moves through the alphabet from A to Z, assigning a letter to the various tools found in this domestic space. Wielding knives, a nutcracker and a rolling pin, Rosler goes about her surreal task: her gestures forcefully punctuate her anger and frustration at the oppressive and stereotypical roles traditionally associated with the female universe.

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Installation view, Video Sound Art XIV edition, Milan, 2024. Ph. Francesca Ferrari

Mara Palena’s research focuses on themes such as memory, remembrance and identity. In her work, photography, sound and video are starting points that sometimes enter the “real” space by taking on their own physicality in the form of installation, through superimpositions and sculptural translations of images. The artist takes elements from archives, often open and participatory ones such as those of home movies as well as drawing on a personal archive made up of photographic images that she has used to keep track of her life for years. The realm of the intimate opens to the collective through the construction of a potentially infinite mnemonic archive. For Frozen Memories V, part of a series started in 2021, the artist imprisons in an ice cube an element familiar to us all, the glowing stars that dotted the ceilings of our rooms as children. The video captures the slow melting of the ice, a stuck memory that is slowly released and set free. The sped-up footage of this act seems to show us the artist’s need to observe from the outside a memory of his own, intimate and reassuring, which is here collectively shared. 

Lose Voice Toolkit is a research project investigating the languages of childhood, the power of silence and other forms of nonverbal communication used as gestures of refusal and as ways to construct spaces of autonomy from the communicative canons of the adult world.
In an indefinable place and time – an ancestral and universal home – a group of children seem to cease using words. These may have been lured away by powerful language-stealing magnets or melted away by sweet voice-losing candy. Either way, the words have disappeared. Children begin to transform and develop a new language of aerial shapes, sharp looks, shared thoughts. One might think they speak with their noses, with their elbows, with their pupils.  
The film is the result of a year of collective research and a workshop with the twenty-three children of Farfallopoli (1B IC Gino Strada, Turin); the content, script and costumes are the result of this collective process.  The work was produced within the Crypt747 Residency and Research Fellowship.
For the 14th edition of Video Sound Art, the artist presents the video as a new installation form: the film is projected within the set design used during filming, involving the viewer in the construction of the visual representation.  The meta-cinematic structure becomes the home of moving images within which the possibilities of cinema, of creating new communicative worlds, intertwine with children in search of new words.

Oltremare Studio focuses on the fragile landscape between the provinces of Vibo Valentia and Reggio Calabria, investigating the intersection between geological history, human migration and the movements of water that have shaped both the land and its inhabitants. The region, once submerged by the sea, is now littered with fossils of extinct marine species preserved in white sand cliffs, giving us a tangible sense of the effects of environmental change by creating a visual connection to the movements of human migration. Oltremare Studio starts from the artist’s personal history and that of the territory, characterised by migration movements first to Argentina and then to Northern Italy. Through a series of recorded conversations, particularly with the artist’s father, the video examines emotional landscapes of departure, oscillating between nostalgia, the desire to overcome one’s borders, and a broader longing for “progress” that drove local politics. Focusing especially on the local youth, at the time when many begin to dream of leaving their homes, the video unfolds between the vast vistas of fossil-rich white quarries, the industrial port of Gioia Tauro, inland landscapes and sea views, domestic interiors, and people in motion. 

For the making of the film Birth of a Nation, made in 2010, Cahen visited Cadet school #9 in Moscow. This is part of the patriotic education of Vladimir Putin’s government. Here girls ages 11 to 17 march in parade uniforms, do field drills, participate in target practice, and learn cooking, sewing, hairstyling, makeup, preparation for military action, and sacrifice for the Motherland. Birth of a Nation offers a glimpse into Putin’s contemporary Russia. The question Cahen’s work poses is how far forms of patriotism determine the surrender of independent thought and action. Fifteen years later, the images of these young women seem to be prophetic, as they lay bare the system of heroic construction of Russian youth. Cahen’s research focuses on forms of political conditioning, with a particular interest in the power of the mass media and its use in the construction of forms of propaganda and indoctrination.

Daya Cahen, Birth of a Nation, 2010.
Installation view, Video Sound Art XIV edition, Milan, 2024. Ph. Francesca Ferrari

Jonathas de Andrade makes videos, photographs, and installations based on the reproduction of images and texts. In his work, the artist uses documentation as well as fictional images to explore social issues, power dynamics, and conflicts in Brazil, investigating the impact of history, slavery, and colonialism on local communities. The video O Caseiro reprises the 1959 film O Mestre de Apipucos [The Masters and the Slaves] by Joaquim Pedro de Andreade. In O Caseiro the screen is symmetrically divided into two narratives. On the left, the 1959 film shows the daily life of Gilberto Freyre, a famous Brazilian writer and sociologist, in his home in the Apipucos neighbourhood of Recife, where the artist currently lives and works. On the right, De Andrade creates a simultaneous mirroring of the original scenes by replacing Freyre himself with the janitor of his wealthy residence. The parallel between the two characters, one historical and one fictional, highlights the differences in class and race, which are also among the most frequently discussed themes in Freyre’s sociological writings.