BUSTROFEDICO

Produced by In Between Art Film and Gluck50

video, color-sound, 14’47’’, 2019, Neither Nor: The Challenge to the Labyrinth, Italian Pavilion, 58th International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale, Courtesy: MiBACT – The Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity

ANNA FRANCESCHINI

Anna Franceschini (Pavia, 1979) is a visual artist, filmmaker and a researcher. Object places and repertoires are privileged subjects of Franceschini’s gaze, they are constantly interrogated through the cinematographic language and re-animated thanks to the moving image. Through an anthropological and poetic use of the cinematographic image, Franceschini questions the shared aesthetic codes that regulate the perception and value of the “system of objects”, opening the way to a new relationship between man and his creations.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunstverein, Dusseldorf; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Museion, Bolzano; CAC, Vilnius; Spike Island, Bristol; Center Pompidou, Paris; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Fiorucci Art Trust, London; Quadrennial, Rome and in several festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, TFF / Torino Film Festival, IFFR / Rotterdam Film Festival. She lives and works in Milan.

“How can one create a labyrinthine film?”, asked artist and filmmaker Anna Franceschini. Lying in her video BUSTROFEDICO (2019), the answer involves developing a series of traps and tricks.

Realised as a special and closing event of the exhibition “Neither Nor: The challenge to the Labyrinth”, curated by Milovan Farronato for the Italian Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale, BUSTROFEDICO turned the Pavilion into a grand viewing machine, i.e. a cinematographic device in itself. Here, the display acted as a spatial and temporal scene, while the film offered its own spatial experience.

Writing that changes direction on each line is called “boustrophedon.” It goes from left to right, then from right to left, and so on. On the “return routes,” even individual letters are written in reverse. It is this idea that, from the very beginning, gave shape to the exhibition’s cinematic interpretation.

BUSTROFEDICO tests the boundaries of cinematographic genres, from the documentary genre to the thriller, thus building a “gender-less” (“genre-less,” cinematographically speaking) and a free-flowing piece. BUSTROFEDICO takes place in the interstitial space of the “film display,” a hybrid which Franceschini has been exploring in her most recent research. The artist combines and interlaces a cinematic approach with that of documentation, through the specific language of exhibition design and technique of items display. In this way, the film doesn’t just become one of the devices that contribute to the memory of the Pavilion itself, but it simultaneously acts as one of its tools for analysis and critique.