"FOR A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS" from “RHUMA - Eritis Sicut Dei" video 2006, length 14:37:18 (inspired by the artwork Rhuma)
“[…] A woman’s eyes opened on the world, a nomad’s gaze that doesn’t end on the shiny surface of consumer goods, but that is in constant movement, crossing the darkness that envelops calculating reason, which has created a “world-machine” of inifinite manipulation. […]”. G. Longoni
ELEMENTS OF BIO-POLITICS OR MARGINALIZATION video 2006, length 28:37:04 In a world ruled by Techne and its way of acting for it's own sake, the dimension of subjectivity is long gone.
In the horizon opened by Techne, the fact of being, bared of the possibility of taking the form of human existence, as a cipher open to possibility, as an action endowed with sense, is no longer possible.
Elsewhere, suffocating tribal archaisms destroy life with cruel ferocity.
Patriarchal law, in its archaic form and in the more recent one of Sole Thought, suffocates Time in an immobile hold and dissipates existence in pain, violence and insignificance.
2007
"BUT WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU" video 2007, length 14:30:00 (inspired by the artwork World Atlas)
The profile of a world is being built by interweaving images. Places of the space which has been freed, by memory, from the temporal order, allowing them to surface in the repetition of a patriarchal system. A violent history, that seems to want to endlessly unwind.
The video comprises several sequences of the World Atlas artwork’s preparation plus several sequences from the films Apocalypse Now; Garage Olimpo; 11/9 - 2002; trip to Kabul 2003.
THE MARCH or of the “children of the cultured men" video 2007, length: 10:32:27
“[…] Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? […]” Virginia Woolf
The sentence, which is reiterated in the fim, is taken from Virginia Woolf’s book “The Three Guineas”
MANUALS OF THE XX CENTURY video 2007, length 00:00:11:47
Inhumanity pertains to the concept of humanity -- so why define
heinous actions as animal-like or bestial if they only belong to
mankind?
The video contains witness accounts of different historical moments that have in common the same experience of violence and discrimination against life.
2008
LAS MARIPOSAS video 2008, length : 23:47:00
Video devoted to the young women of Ciudad Juarez and to all the women who can no longer fly.
2009
È UN CONGEGNO STRANO
(IT'S A STRANGE DEVICE) video 2009, length 00:12:00 - voices: Libera Mazzoleni and Riccardo
Longoni(from the preparation of the performance Dibutade)
A soulless city, a “non-place of super modernity” (Augé)
seems to contain a body expropriated of its humanity.
The film originated from the influence of Kafka's story “The Penal Colony”.
In the tale a young officer, fascinated by the perfect functioning of an instrument
built to inflict the death penalty, lets himself go blindly to the exaltation
of that murderous technology which, at the end, will drag him into the victim's
whirlpool, after having made him become a murderer unconscious of the pain
he has caused.
Kafka's story is seen as a metaphor for our time marked by the violence and by the omnipotence of economic and military techno-science.
2010
OH! IDENTITY video 2010, length 00:19:36 - music for piano by Daria Baiocchi
To cancel existence, depriving it of that level of subjective depth
– which constitutes its intimate makeup - in order to affirm
objectivity's primacy, means losing it in the anonymity of things.
2011
A VERY TIRING JOURNEY video 2011, length 00:03:17
A figure is slogging along, slowly pushing down on the pedals of a bicycle...
perhaps it is a man doing sport, he is certainly well outfitted for
his excursion, so his trip will be over when he reaches his desired destination;
there he can take a well-deserved rest, surrounded by the
flashes of the photographers who want to be remembered for all time as
the winner.
But who is that figure? A man or a machine?
Uneasy foretelling of a possible future?
2012
CANTVS III music video 2012, length 00:10:25, original music: Daria Baiocchi
recitant voice: Valerio Ameli, tenor: Francesco Maria Ferrario.
CANTVSIII grows as music video for the piece "Ombre(Shadows)" for piano, recitant voice and electronics written by Daria Baiocchi. Libera Mazzoleni, Italian artist, sign the direction of the video.
The Milan subway and The Divine Comedy written by the italian poet Dante Alighieri(XIV cent.)
are the Leitmotiv of the whole composition used as a sort of thematic mind-trip. In particular the "Hell-3th chant" is cited, with Charon, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron. Cantus III is a travel in our mind when we are alone with ourselves, also if we are with other persons and we start to think to something and estrange ourselves. All persons around become shadows for us but we never think that we are also a shadow for others. Voices, subway's noises and mind's lines work together to build this mystical composition. (Daria Baiocchi)
SURE OF OUR PROGRESS video 2012, durata 00:08:48 - voices: Silvana Baga, Pino Cenzo, Riccardo Longoni, Serena Mauri,Libera, Daniela Vanoli; music: Rita Marcotulli, Silvana Renzini, Daria Baiocchi, Maurizio Signorino, Lar Cobsay.
In the video, the view of one subject's view, uncertain and fragmentary, is lost among the tempting offers of a market that promises to fulfill every desire.
Can it be that the task of saving man from the terror of his vulnerability is entrusted, paradoxically, to a world peopled by surrogate aliens?
2013
CALCOLO ERGO SUM? video 2013, length 00:05:44 - music: piano, Fragment71, Fragment/2 from Koiné by Rita Marcotulli.
Maybe today thought is no longer a central reference of the subject...
Has it been replaced by economic and technical calculation?
The images evoke the possible metamorphosis.
PANOPTICON video 2013, length 00:05:20 - text: Libera; voice: Lucia Schillaci; piano: Rita Marcotulli.
From Plato to Foucault, power has always been the object of attention.
Jeremy Bentham, in his "Panopticon", imagined that an occult observer could keep a crowd of unsuspecting people under continuous and total control.
Otherwise, we, the citizens of the contemporary world, we live in the certainty that we live in absolute freedom and, with difficulty, we may recognize ourselves in some reflections that reveal the repressed, convinced as we are to live in the best of all possible worlds. However, power is still more complete when its command is more silent and invisible, and when its freedom is more ensured, as Gunther Anders says.
2014
CHICKEN AND ART video 2014, length 00:05:12
We are the viewers of art, but what is art? for the ancients it was brightness and splendor of the sensible, a source of pleasure, a gift from the gods, the liberation of the soul from the hýbris. For the modern, it is a form of manifestation of the spirit destined to be overcome! And then, the fatal blow, the work as a collective product of many subjects who cooperate in the network. Then it is not possible to distinguish between artist and critic, between work and discourse, between the work and the product, between subversion and promotion. And yet...
