Edited by Cristiana Collu and Saretto Cincinelli
More than an international video exhibition, L’evento immobile (contratempi) developed by the Man Museum of Nuoro for the “L’isola delle storie” literary festival in Gavoi, is configured as a real video exhibition that delves into to that changing border territory which has always, and in particular in recent years, maintained a close relationship between cinema, video and contemporary art. Through the works of: Sabrina Mezzaqui, Hans Op de Beeck, Adrian Paci, Rossella Biscotti, Daniela De Lorenzo, Ursula Mayer, Massimo Barzagli – Luisa Cortesi, Patrick Jolley, Rebecca Trost, Inger Lisa Hansen, and Carl Michael von Ausswolff-Thomas Nordstad , the exhibition seeks to circumscribe and decline a figure whose cruciality is demonstrated by the persistence with which it seems to come to attention in different but significant seasons of contemporary research: a figure whose remote center of gravity seems attributable to the oscillation between movement and immobility, a topos which, albeit along a karst and discontinuous line, marked by profound modifications, leads from the radical, pioneering experiments of Andy Warhol (Empire, 1964, Sleep, 1964 etc.) or Michael Snow (Wawelength, 1966/7) to Sixty minutes silence (1996) by Gillian Wearing or a Teatro Amazonas (1999) by Sharon Lockhart, a Needle Woman (1999-2000) by Kim Sooja and, to name at least one Italian artist, several works by Grazia Toderi.
Giving up movement, the ubiquity of the camera or shooting subjects who are basically still appear to be options that are, to say the least, outdated and anachronistic, apparently improper ways of using cinema and video. This inappropriateness, which does not fail to reflect on the nature of the image and reverberate on the spectator’s expectations, immediately becomes problematic since it seems to deny any form of narrativity and lead cinema and video towards the medusation typical of the photographic image, towards an imperfect, precarious static nature. and vibrant which, precisely for this reason, tends to shift attention from the iconic element towards the temporal, sound and structural dimension of the image. It is this enchantment of the event rather than its dry immobility that constitutes, in ever-changing ways, the background in which the video exhibition is articulated.
The immobility contained in the oxymoron of the title that the exhibition tries to express cannot in fact be traced back solely to the static nature of the camera or the subject filmed but, more generally, to what we could define as a smaller dimension of the moving image, a dimension which, being missing, ends up having repercussions après coup on the expressiveness of works that voluntarily avoid the use of eloquence and the sophisticated predictability that characterizes the current use of audiovisual language in movement. In all the films and videos proposed, some typical dimension of cinematographic language, with greater or lesser radicality, tends to dissolve but, as in a game in which the winner loses, the works seem to gain from the economy that characterizes them.
An economy which, paradoxically, ends up returning a surplus of presence to the starting image as in the extraordinary, Franciscan video-haikus of Sabrina Mezzaqui, in the elaborate returns of the narrative on itself by Ursula Mayer or Hans Op De Beeck, in game of presence and absence staged in the transition between images of different nature by Massimo Barzagli-Luisa Cortesi, in the use of the mishap that characterizes the poses of Daniela De Lorenzo, in the imperfect static nature of Rossella Biscotti’s video portraits, in the severe almost sacred static nature achieved by Adrian Paci, in the uninhabited but strongly evocative interiors and exteriors of Patrick Jolley, Rebecca Trost, Inger Lisa Hansen and Carl Michael von Ausswolff and Thomas Nordstad.
