Link: Event in connection with the exhibition, Saturday, 14 June 2014
From thousands of possibilities continues Maria Iorio / Raphaël Cuomo’s research on the intertwined histories of migration, urbanisation and cinema in Italy, focusing more specifically on the informal common grounds of the metropolitan space. It also initiates an exploration of the passages between experimental film and militant cinema in the early 1970s, in relation to the activities of Unitelefilm, an audio-visual structure whose films are currently preserved in the Archivio del movimento operaio e democratico in Rome. Unitelefilm collected and conserved the official propaganda of the Italian communist party while from 1964 onwards it also developed an autonomous film production. The resulting multi-part installation From thousands of possibilities brings together a video, a slide-projection decomposing sequences of post-WWII Italian cinema classics, as well as the display of a selection of books and magazines, historical sources and research material that both invite to share readings and to retrace the working process itself.
Remains of the makeshift homes that spread along the Felice Aqueduct in the Mandrione quarter of Rome in the post-war period are still visible nowadays. Back then, these shantytowns inspired neorealist culture – but critical commentators like Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked that neorealism reached crisis point when it attempted to confront and depict this squalid situation. The shantytowns that proliferated in the peripheries of the major Italian cities in the industrial North and in Rome as a result of intense internal migration became the subject of films and other cultural productions, as well as “documentary” enquiries often instrumentalising this reality for political ends or essentialising the nature of their inhabitants as primitive, contradictory, and immutable. By the end of the 1960s, contradicting these clichés, the inhabitants of the informal settlements became protagonists of urban struggles and developed forms of collective organisation and direct action.
Looking back on a little-known episode of these struggles From thousands of possibilities examines a filmic document found in the Archivio del movimento operaio e democratico in Rome. The raw footage records the squatting of a house and occupation of a street in the centre of Rome by a group of baraccati, inhabitants of the shacks, in November 1970. A gesture of an occupant, a young woman hiding her face from the camera, became the starting point of the artists research that attempts to reconstruct the course of this past event as well as to manifest the present material conditions that allow this reconstruction. Beginning in the Cinema America, a former movie theatre currently occupied by squatters, the video evokes the transformations and struggles that have shaped the metropolitan space, and traces different physical displacements between the center and peripheries, including the exclusion of the lower-classes from the city center during fascism when the regime conducted the sventramenti* in the 1920s or the expeditions of a mobile upper class, especially journalists and intellectuals reporting on the situation they encountered in the remote peripheries. Thus From thousands of possibilities comments on a series of “looking relations” – relations of the gaze – also occuring when the baraccati reversed the movement and became visible in the city center, fighting for their self-determination.
*literaly, „disemboweling“: the process of demolition of lower-class housing, excavation of ruins of the ancient imperial Rome, and construction of large piazzas and avenues suitable for mass demonstrations and parades in the centre of Rome.
Thanks to: Archivio del movimento operaio e democratico (Roma), Valeria Cardea, Cinema America Occupato (Roma), Donatello Della Peppa, Aura Ghezzi, Federico Giacinti, Maria Jacini, Claudio Olivieri, Anna Lajolo, Annamaria Licciardello, Guido Lombardi, Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka WARBEAR, MediaLab-HKB, Mathias Montavon, Giacomo Ravesi, Revok, Luca Ricciardi, Marc-Olivier Schatz, Self Made Urbanism Rome, Amrit Paolo Srivastava
The film From thousands of possibilities was realised with the support of République et Canton de Genève, République et Canton du Jura.
The exhibition and event are supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung.
