with Mercedes Azpilicueta, Filipa Cesar & Louis Henderson, Eli Cortiñas
curated by Martina Angelotti

29.05 > 7.07.2018

At its second edition, CINEMODERNO is structured around the imaginary of video and its performative potential. The project is manifested in the form of festivals diluted over a period of two months, in which artists are invited to perform every two weeks and to present a re-elaboration and reformulation - in a performative key - of a video research already started.

Since from the first edition - which involved the artists Eva and Franco Mattes; Anna Franceschini and Diego Marcon; Teresa Cos; Francesco Fonassi, with a prologue by Massimo Carozzi - CINEMODERNO explores the language of video in all its multiple dimensions - sculptural, sound, visual - to investigate forms of interaction between the visual narration of the film and its hypertextuality, between the two-dimensional form of the projection and the three-dimensional one of its "staging". CINEMODERNO is inspired by an anthropological perspective, which Rachel O. Moore identifies in cinema through the definition of "magic ritual" with the power to revive, heal and enchant.

For this edition CINEMODERNO is configured through three live interventions that return different sets of space - designed for both live and exhibition - for the duration of two weeks each. The invited artists, coming from different physical and mental geographies, are united by research aspects focused on the analysis of performative practices related to cinema or its ritual dimension, often approached through found-footage and documentary techniques, and which investigate the dimension of the "exotic" from very different perspectives and geographical gazes.

From the video performance of the Argentinean and half Italian artist Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Facultad, 2018) who investigates through the movement, language, sound and video, the relationship between the female body and the social body. The "westernized" jungle of the Tarzan series and other previous projects by Eli Cortiñas, whose lecture performance reveals the research process and the relationship between artist and ethnographer, to the political potential returned in a live form, by Filipa Cesar & Luis Henderson's Op-art: a film made with lenses and celluloid photosensitive to the desktop localization engine, which passes from the production of Fresnel lens material to the invention of global satellite navigation systems (GNSS), an instrument announcing the obsolescence of the sighting beacon.

Program

29.05.2018 - 8pm

La facultad, 2018
live performance by Mercedes Azpilicueta
set until 12th June

a live work introduced in three acts
a test for a vulnerable body in an unknown space
a staccato of different voices, sound clips and projected images.

La facultad is a term coined by Gloria Anzaldúa that refers to the capacity developed by many on the border “to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities”. It is an instant “sensing”, a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols -which are the faces of feelings.

13.06.2018 - 7 pm

The Opal and the Sunstone, 2017
project by Filipa César and Louis Henderson
live projection and reading by Louis Henderson
set until 26th June

The interview with Roque Pina, the lighthouse guardian of Cabo da Roca - located at the western end of the European continent - becomes the starting point for an investigation that explores the way in which optical technologies - widely developed in the military and colonial field - they have profoundly transformed the way of reading, governing and "possessing" the world visually. Starting from the Fresnel lenses of the lighthouse - created by man to shed light on the unknown - up to the global GPS satellite navigation systems, the artists move a criticism towards the western construction of knowledge and communication, based on the projection of light , of which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought perfectly embodies the desires.

Incorporating 16mm, digital, CGI images, the film thus maps a technological trajectory: from the old methods of optical navigation to the new localization algorithms; from the singular projection to the multi-perspective satellite visions. And one wonders, in the end, what the role of the lighthouse and its guardian can be today, when the whole functioning and surveillance system has been automated. Weaving a live dialogue, Luis Henderson alternates his voice with that of Filipa and Roque, retracing the recent results of technological progress in the optical field and analyzing the reasons also in metaphorical terms, which led to an obsolescence of the lighthouse, emptied of its original function as a powerful and all-encompassing control object, it has become a mythical and dead place.

27.06.2018 - 7 pm

All Voodoo Happens at Night, 2018
Lecture Performance by Eli Cortiñas
set until 8th July

In All Voodoo Happens at Night Cortiñas explores the performativity of the archival material she employs in her video installations. By re-employing such material and diffracting the outlines where the ideas of testimony and monument, of narration and technical media overlap, Cortiñas’ montage brings about a blurring of the point(s) of view(s) in modern Western myths of origins.

In a current situation of over-production of moving images, archaeological sites and nature reserves represent an exhaustible source of fantasy with yearnings driven by these primordial myths. Through the phantasmagoric transformation capability of cinema, nature in the case of the Tarzan films - which material forms the center pillar of Cortiñas’ lecture performance - function as a mere ornament, which can turn under a new negotiated narrative into a living figure. In the words of Jean Epstein: “If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant or a stone can inspire respect, fear and horror, those three most sacred sentiments, we must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious silent lives…”.

Thanks to Studio Azzurro, Show Biz Milano and Elianto Film