LAPIDI

2018, video installation, produced by In Between Art Film, commissioned by Manifesta 12

YURI ANCARANI

Yuri Ancarani, born in 1972 in Ravenna, is an Italian video artist. His works, which combine elements of documentary cinema and contemporary art, aim to explore aspects that go unnoticed in everyday life. His way of focusing and using the camera with meticulous precision creates his distinct aesthetics, marked by the sculptural depth of the shots and of video works that investigate the hidden elements of daily life and of social codes. His works have been presented in numerous exhibitions and museums in Italy and abroad, including the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), MAXXI (Rome), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and the Guggenheim Museum (New York). In 2016 his feature film The Challenge won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Festival.

In Lapidi (2018), Yuri Ancarani filmed the memorials honouring the lives and works of the magistrates, civilians, journalists, police officers and all those who have been victims of the Mafia in Palermo. The video is a sequence of silent shots, in which the commemorative plaques become video sculptures.

Between aesthetic catharsis and hysteric repetitive coaction, we see tourists handing into the web the electronic trace of their pilgrimage to those memorials in Palermo through the meta-temporal dimension of the selfie.

Lapidi attempts to audit contemporary practices of remembrance and their metamorphosis in relation to trauma and collective history’s lacerations, calling into question the effectiveness of the reconstructive and healing mechanism of social memory.