Memories of Lightning

Milano 2, a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of Milan. Built between 1970 and 1979 as a utopic city, it was Silvio Berlusconi’s first ambitious urban project. An area that today, at first glance could look like an anonymous suburb was once the laboratory for the imposition of a new lifestyle, which in the decades of “Berlusconism” spread at a national level and radically transformed the Italian culture.

A hundred years of images researched and found, Fragments of film, family reels, pixels. A martyr saint, a warrior. Saint Efisio, an icon who moves the people. A holiday, a rite which repeats outside of time and brings with it the masks of dominations past and present, of an island; Sardinia. What escapes? What remains? Question and answer is the foundation of editing And renews the past in another past. In this encounter of deferred glances, the holy day is renewed again in memory and in dream, far from known places.

The filmmaker spent a year at Atelier Colla, one of the world’s largest and oldest puppet theatres, which has existed for some 300 years and houses over 3,000 puppets. In reverse chronology, the film – which was written by an artificial neural network – depicts the rituals of the puppeteers.

A collective work achieved by dismantling and reshaping the artwork by artists Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Riccardo Giacconi, Alessandro Penta, Vittoria Soddu, and Carolina Valencia, realized for the “REMIX” project. The result is a new visionary, heterogeneous and highly contemporary artwork.

Extending the artist’s research into the complex genealogy of South Tyrol, a province that’s home to Italy’s German-speaking population, Riccardo Giacconi’s film offers a minute, zoomed-in examination of historical photographs, uncovering the markers of an insidious ideological undercurrent—sometimes oblique, sometimes overt—sustained through neo-fascist symbolism, rituals, and terrorist activity into the present.

A. is obsessed with his image. Like a post-modern Narcissus, he projects himself in the endless choices that social media devices offer him. Riccardo Giacconi creates a disquieting film about a teenager who gets lost in the maze of the never-ending reproductions of his Dorian Grayesque portrait. Taking to new and yet unexplored extremes, the fixation with the digital screens in their many guises, the film works like an almost endless fall – without any kind of parachute – through the network of images hidden behind and inside other images.

With formal precision, Riccardo Giacconi proposes a curious and surprising dialogue which articulates the old tradition of puppetry with robotics and artificial intelligence: two totally different forms of research and creation that nevertheless share a passion for the movement of anthropomorphic bodies and their endless possibilities.

In 1990 poet Maria Luisa Spaziani (Turin, 1922 - Rome, 2014) published one of her more experimental works, the poem in heroic verse "Giovanna d’Arco" (Joan of Arc). One of the distinctive elements of the book is the invention of a language: Joan speaks with an angel, who addresses her in a non-existent language. The angel who embodies such voice is, for Spaziani, poetry itself, that is, that force that constantly presses the boundaries of language and the speakable, deforming such boundaries, revealing glimmers of unexplored areas of pure voice. The film features images of sea landscapes and a series of audio recordings of fire, two elements that constantly recur in the path Spaziani traces along the trajectory of her enunciation.