Installation, 35mm film projector, thermal blanket, banana peels
The installation, whose title in Italian plays between ‘lens focusing’ and ‘mass on fire,’ translates the tragedy of the migrants’ deaths in the Mediterranean Sea in vernacular language. It is an allegorical re-enactment of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem Profezia, written and printed in the shape of a cross in the book Poesia in forma di rosa. In the midst of the economic boom, the poet is like a clairvoyant who foresees the inevitable exodus of desperate peoples from the south of the world.
Hundreds of banana peels lie in a row on a thermal blanket, like migratory game killed by poachers, burning in the light of a film projector sitting in the centre of an altar. A vanishing point reminiscent of the monstrance of Raffaello’s fresco Disputation of the Holy Sacrament painted in Pope Julius II’s Stanze. The hosts are classified based on their diameter; ordinary ones measure 35mm, just like film stock.
Messa a fuoco is part of the cycle of works ESSO: SHADOWS OOZING GOLD with which Carloni-Franceschetti won the 10th Edition of Italian Council, a call from the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture created to promote Italian contemporary art abroad. P.P.P. , the theme of the 56th Pesaro Film Festival (2020) created by the two artists, was also included in this cycle.
ESSO: SHADOWS OOZING GOLD is supported by ICA (Zagreb), Trieste Contemporanea (Trieste), HAR (Paris), Fondazione Pesaro Nuovo Cinema onlus (Pesaro), IUAV (Venice), Usmaradio (RSM), Adriatico Book Club (Venice), and Gasparelli Arte Contemporanea (Fano).
Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti studied animation and painting in Urbino (Italy). They are teachers and artists who have made videos and installations, focusing on the use of techniques designed to explore the optical procedures of vision in the transmutation of matter and the temporal shift of memory. Their long-time collaboration with Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio brings their works to the most important avant-garde theatres in the world.
Their works have been shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Louvre, Paris, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, La Biennale Teatro, Venice, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, Oxo Tower, London, and Martin Segal Center, New York.
www.carloni-franceschetti.it
ALL SCREENINGS ARE FREE