Francesco Zanatta

Devoured images.

La Piave is an attempt to describe the Piave river and its surroundings as a character in constant change. Each chapter shows a different research session in which the landscape is analyzed in its structure through individual shots, thus forming a naturalist mosaic that accounts for the different conformations of the territory over the years. This first part collects the documentation of the place made by me between 2017 and 2021, as well as a couple of found footage sequences.

An exploration of the human body in the age of the internet through hundreds of Youtube clips.

From 1947 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force carried out a systematic study of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings, codenamed “Project Blue Book.” Thousands of reports from American and European citizens were recorded during those years; more than 700 cases remained “unidentified.” The film reuses original documents from the now-declassified project, superimposing them over family footage from the same period. In the encounter between the domestic and the scientific, the familiar and the alien, a hidden portrait emerges of a nation haunted by its own astronomical obsessions.

Bodies in spaces and the search for emptiness.

An old woman relives her life through words.

A collective act of caring over the course of one night.

To search. To remember and to search. To remember and to find. To search and to find again. In the labyrinth of the mind, the only way to find is to get lost in the limbo and start again from oneself.

Halfway between a video installation, a performance and an in situ work, Il carbonasso was created starting from the discovery and intense exploration of a hidden and isolated place near the Piave river. The video consists of a series of long and fixed shots in which it is possible to perceive a mysterious and elusive creature. Observation soon becomes contemplation and meditation in which the gaze is lost in the image in search of the enigmatic presence. The title of the work and the name of the (non) protagonist derive from the dialectal name of the rat snake, a very common non-poisonous snake near water courses.

A weeping for a forest, a weeping for a river.

Dreaming about Venezia 77.

This is not a flicker film.

A trip along the beach of the Venice Lido.

Experimental documentary on fog.

Something from a year that never existed.

23 days of waiting, boredom and light.

Apophenia is a horror film, a video essay and a travel documentary in which an urban legend becomes the starting point of a Lovecraftian tale in search of a disturbing unknown. The images emerge from the web intertwining and overlapping, showing themselves as symptoms of a collective schizophrenia to which the user slowly succumbs.

A man in crisis, disappointed by others and by himself.

Second part of a video diary on the Piave river. Cuts and transitions.

Along the river, the landscape is uncertain. Light settles and unsettles.

Between the early 1990s and late 2000s, in what can be considered the golden age of Italian disco, a number of people chose to document a swirling, sleepless nightlife. What emerged is a collection of low-definition videos in which flashing lights, pulsating music and dancing bodies merge to become a mass in constant agitation. Viva la notte starts from this material to explore and expand the sense of loss that characterizes it, taking it to a level of abstraction and opacity where the image dissolves similarly to the world that generated it. Forms are lost in the dark and what remains are the evanescent traces of another place, populated by fleeting ghosts in search of perpetual instability.

Third part of a video diary on the Piave river. Stillness and movement.

An installation designed to be exhibited on the windows of the Museo del Novecento in Milan and consists of the reassembly of fragments from Fuori Orario, the famous program conceived by enrico ghezzi. Over the course of 60 minutes, film sequences, montages, theme songs and nocturnal presentations alternate between the early nineties and the end of the 2000s. Fuori Orario is seen fragmentarily, it is thought first of all by separating image and sound: only inside the museum can it be heard and only outside can it be seen. In both cases, the work is made up of superimpositions, forms and words that escape and chase each other. Entering the endless night, the impossibility of an absolute gaze is increasingly revealed. In the construction of the sequences, the previous thought is not forgotten, but it is recontextualized within the same frame, it is put back into the discourse, conscious but uncontrolled reactivation.

A six hour journey through the night.