Looking at our times through the prism of the moving image.
At Fondazione In Between Art Film, we foster dialogues between video, cinema, and performance, supporting artists and institutions whose visions cross the boundaries between creative disciplines.
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Today is the last day to catch the monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (29 November–1 December) as part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
With a background in electronic music, experimental cinema, and poetry, Abbas and Abou-Rahme create audiovisual installations in which the juxtaposition of sounds, images, and words brings to the fore certain facts of history and of the present day that have been subject to removal
This video was the first work completed by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme working in partnership. “Collapse” (2009) is a multilayered documentary of self-produced material combined with images borrowed from the following films: “The Open Door” (1964), directed by Henry Barakat, focusing on women in Egypt in the 1960s and their struggle for independence; “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), directed by Sergei Eisenstein, on the October Revolution; and “The Battle of Algiers” (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. The sequences of images are fragmented, there is no linear narrative as such, in contrast to the aforementioned films themselves. Moreover, the soundtrack is composed of fragments of the films spliced together with self-produced recordings. It is precisely the soundtrack that heightens the tension within the work, which endeavors to encapsulate the frustration of struggle, personal and historical traumas, and fragmentation as an approach to memory and history. “Collapse” is an assemblage of reality and fiction, in which the shift recurs both as literal action––out of the various sources used, the actions of people moving from one point to another come up time and again––and as poetic action, depicting a present-day Palestinian landscape in ruins. Anachronistic and atemporal, the video also analyzes the condition of failure, on the part of mankind, of history, and of narrative, all of which are key themes for the duo’s practice. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Images credit: Stills from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Collapse, 2009. Courtesy of the artists
The monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (29 November–1 December) continues with the video “Only the beloved keeps our secrets” (2016). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
With a background in electronic music, experimental cinema, and poetry, Abbas and Abou-Rahme create audiovisual installations in which the juxtaposition of sounds, images, and words brings to the fore certain facts of history and of the present day that have been subject to removal
The images accumulate densely in every sequence of this video, and flow like visual stratifications in motion. Every new image that is transferred onto the previous image seems to absorb it before eliminating it. The content of the video is the result of five years of research and compilation of material––mostly in Palestine––that includes samples of online recordings of rituals and everyday performances, landscapes, and trees growing in abandoned complexes. The screenplay is built around the surveillance video of a 14-year-old Palestinian, Yusuf Shawamreh, who on 19 March 2014, was killed by the Israeli army for having crossed the West Bank barrier near Hebron. The boy was on his way to collect Gundelia, a plant that blooms only for a short period of time and which is widely used in Palestinian cuisine. After a court injunction, the military surveillance film was released and disseminated online. Abbas and Abou-Rahme reflect on the circulation and the value of images, on the subtle relationship that exists between the destruction of bodies and the deletion of images. The duo’s approach to moving images is based on rewriting contexts in which bodies violated––by other people or by the web––can reappear, and the ways in which they do so. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Image credit: Still from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Only the beloved keeps our secrets, 2016. Courtesy of the artists
The monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (29 Nov–1 Dec) continues with the video “The Incidental Insurgents: Unforgiving Years” (2012-2015). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
With a background in electronic music, experimental cinema, and poetry, Abbas and Abou-Rahme create audiovisual installations in which the juxtaposition of sounds, images, and words brings to the fore certain facts of history and of the present day that have been subject to removal
In “Unforgiving Years,” the second part of “The Incidental Insurgents,” Abbas and Abou-Rahme continue to retrace the story of the bandits recounted in “The Part about The Bandits,” as well as the resonance of the actions of these figures even years after they were killed. The camera always films two people from behind, in places that are desolate and, in some sense, dark. This second part of “The Incidental Insurgents” focuses more on the relationship between these figures and historiography. The work aims to explore the nature of those considered outlaws, and the actual role played by them in revolutions, bringing to light a counter-narrative: the weakness of those figures more often than not reduced to being accessories with respect to history, and their constant search for ways to give shape to increasingly radical actions. “Unforgiving Years” was also a way for the duo to call into question their contribution as artists in highlighting the political decline of Palestine. This video, too, is concerned with a lost memory, the rubble of the capitalist-colonial past that lingers to this day over our present. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Images credit: Stills from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Incidental Insurgents: Unforgiving Years, 2012-2015. Courtesy of the artists
The monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (29 Nov–1 Dec) continues with the video “The Incidental Insurgents: The Part About the Bandits” (2012-2015). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
With a background in electronic music, experimental cinema, and poetry, Abbas and Abou-Rahme create audiovisual installations in which the juxtaposition of sounds, images, and words brings to the fore certain facts of history and of the present day that have been subject to removal
“The Incidental Insurgents” takes the form of a multilayered narrative organized into three chapters that explore an intricate network of revolutionary histories, geographies and moments. The three works that comprise the series each present an audiovisual work within a wider installation. “The Part About the Bandits” features the amplified version of the studio of Abbas and Abou-Rahme, where the research material, mixed in with intimate details of their daily life, is presented obsessively; the audio comes from the noise of a disc reader whirring round, while looped images are displayed on a monitor. The video in question, which constitutes the other part of this work, is configured as an investigation into the complexity of the position of artists. The duo draw on a range of sources: the life of the anarchist Victor Serge and the Bonnot Gang in Paris in the 20th century; the gang of Abu Jilda and Al-Armit involved in a rebellion against the British in 1930s Palestine; the artist as the bandit par excellence, in the Roberto Bolaño novel “The Savage Detectives,” set in Mexico in the 1970s. Using literary and factual sources as their starting point, Abbas and Abou-Rahme allow a story to emerge that, through different timescales and geographies, probes the positioning of the individual with respect to the events that surround them. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Images credit: Stills from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Incidental Insurgents: The Part About the Bandits, 2012-2015. Courtesy of the artists
Today begins the monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (29 Nov–1 Dec). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
With a background in electronic music, experimental cinema, and poetry, Abbas and Abou-Rahme create audiovisual installations in which the juxtaposition of sounds, images, and words brings to the fore certain facts of history and of the present day that have been subject to removal
“At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other” (2019) sees samples of existing, self-produced information layered on top of each other: nocturnal images of the wall that encloses the Gaza Strip; digital images of avatars; and a text, all accompanied by audio composed of echoes and vocal samplers. Starting from fragments of Edward Said’s “After the Last Sky” (1986), the screenplay conceived by the artists is a meditation on what it means to be an ‘illegal’ person, body, or entity, in the world which we inhabit. Making use of a piece of software that generates avatars from a single image, the faces that we see in the video are taken from those of people who participated in the “Great March of Return,” which demanded the right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees, as well as an end to the Israeli blockade. The scars, defects and incomplete features of the avatars’ faces are the result both of the reprocessing carried out by the software algorithm and of the low resolution of the images that circulate freely on the web. The video is also an attempt to bridge an impossible gap at once physical and abstract: that between the artists who, finding themselves in Palestine, tried in vain to reach the protestors, and their avatars which, in contrast, appear in the audiovisual reconstruction of the march. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Images credit: Stills from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other, 2019. Courtesy the artists
Today begins the monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Diego Marcon (26–28 November). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi.
Research into the conventions of cinema shapes the practice of Diego Marcon: his work in the field of moving images interweaves his reflection on the inherent aspects of popular entertainment and fiction with a tension towards a form of empathy that embraces universal sentiments.
She Loves You, 2008
Claudia, the protagonist of the work, is shown in her house as she shares with the video camera the story of her torments, her voice breaking and her gaze disillusioned. With great awareness, she addresses the theme of pain after a loss, the inability to share this suffering with others, and the discomfort of being surrounded by people to exorcize the grief. The woman rediscovers self-awareness in her solitude and in her boundless passion for the Beatles, of whom she owns an extensive collection of records, photographs, books, and merchandise. “She Loves You,” which takes its title from one of the band’s well-known songs, is a reflection on loss and on emotional ties, as well as on desire and memory. Claudia’s story alternates with moments of listening to other songs by the Beatles and moments of reading books on the band, in a continual overlapping of her emotions with those of entire generations who have mourned the death of John Lennon. Claudia talks about Lennon as the one who helped her to overcome the emotional impasse she faced in the wake of the trauma she lived through and to free herself from her expectations vis-à-vis any all-encompassing serenity as one half of a couple. Together, Claudia’s vulnerability, her knowledge of living with her own pain, and her capacity to overcome social conditioning, are emblematic of an emotional complexity that the artist explores through the power of the moving image. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Image credit: Still from Diego Marcon, She Loves You, 2008 ©️ Diego Marcon. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Today is the last day to catch the monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Giorgio Andreotta Calò (22–24 November). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s practice is an expansive exploration into the condition of the fragment, into the places and architectures that undergo the vulnerability of living matter, being reconfigured as sculptures, installations and videos in which the formal choices are the result of an ongoing negotiation between chronological and emotional time.
Icarus, 2021
In December 2020 in Emmen, Andreotta Calò intervened on the so-called butterfly pavilion, an architecture once dedicated to lepidopterans and part of a larger zoological complex that had been disused for years. Thanks to the collaboration of Enzo Moretto, an expert entomologist, and Bart Coppens, a young self-taught entomologist, a colony of moths is reestablished inside the building, in a final symbolic act that precedes its demolition. In a landscape dominated by the emptiness imposed by the pandemic, the pavilion, in a reverse movement, returns to being animated by thousands of moths. The metamorphosis of the insects, documented through video footage, triggers a parallel change in the environment and the characters who occupy it. The moths, motionless during daylight hours, reactivate as the sun sets—it is in this liminal space, at the threshold of the oneiric, that myth can manifest itself and coincide with reality. The figure of the expert entomologist versed in the secrets of science recalls that of Daedalus, while the apprentice, fascinated by the former’s ability to direct nature, evokes Icarus. Their contingent acts create a parallel with the myth, and the film, from a documentation of a biological transformation, embraces the language of myth where reality and fiction coincide.
Free entry
Image credit: Still from Giorgio Andreotta Calò, ΊΚΑΡΟΣ (Icarus), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria ZERO…, Milan
The monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Giorgio Andreotta Calò (22–24 November) continues with the video “In girum imus nocte” (2015). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s practice is an expansive exploration into the condition of the fragment, into the places and architectures that undergo the vulnerability of living matter, being reconfigured as sculptures, installations and videos in which the formal choices are the result of an ongoing negotiation between chronological and emotional time.
On December 4, 2014, together with a group of miners, the artist walked from Carbosulcis—then the last working coal mine in the Sulcis Iglesiente area of south-western Sardinia—all the way to the island of Sant’Antioco. The action, carried out from dusk through to dawn, was recorded, giving rise to the 16 mm silent film of the same name. The title refers to the Latin palindrome “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,” which means “We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire.” The lights of the miners’ head torches, initially sporadic and then increasingly blinding, are the only light sources in the film, together with the flames of a fire. The miners advance in single file from the Carbosulcis mine to Punta Trettu, before continuing towards Sant’Antioco’s beach of Stagno Cirdu, where a wooden boat burns until it is charred. The overwhelming darkness makes it impossible to see where they have come from, all we can discern is the subdued atmosphere. The film begins and ends with the flames produced by the boat on fire, highlighting what is a key element for the artist: the circularity of time. The overnight procession, carried out following the decision to close the business in 2014, effectively becomes a symbol of the worthlessness of a mine that has lost its raison d’être, modifying forever the relationship between place and productivity. (Text edited by @elekitri)
Free entry
Image credit: Still from Giorgio Andreotta Calò, in girum imus nocte, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galleria ZERO…, Milan