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Io, Tu, Lui, Lei. in Venice
in the rooms of Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation
is an exhibition which tells about an extraordinary meeting
between a group of Italian young artists
and a group of gay and lesbian men and women, born around the 1930s and 40s
After a long gestation we finally reach a public moment.
As a matter of fact, Io, Tu, Lui, Lei is the result of a workshop
which has been active in Venice for about a year
thanks to the City's *** observatory
and to the Unar's financing of the Equal Opportunities Department.
During a residency program in Venice
the artists had the opportunity to meet up
with the curators Pier Luigi Tazzi and Filipa Ramos,
the artist Chiara Fumai,
the sociologist Luca Trappolin,
the exponent of the Venetian political life Camilla Seibezzi.
We asked ourselves how the memories of a group of gay and lesbian people
could become everybody's heritage.
The criterion is not the one of an orthodox adherence to *** themes,
but rather that of a happy experimental immersion in a still unknown universe.
The exhibitive route starts from the hall of Palazzetto Tito.
Closed inside a wardrobe
we actually find a series of documents and daily and monthly papers front pages
from the 70s 80s and 90s.
These publications clearly describe the way
mass Italian culture treated the topic of homosexual identity.
In this room we can also see exposed the works
of another six Italian artists who didn't take part in the workshop
but we still asked them to be involved
because in these latest years they are developing research about identity.
We commissioned 6 film posters
from them which represent as many films.
Chiara Fumai in particular interpreted our request creating a diorama
which comments on the figures and the protagonists of Jack Smith's movies.
Daniele Pezzi revisited the Thai movie Tropical Malady,
Antonio Barletta the documentary Paris is Burning,
Dafne Boggeri The killing of Sister George by Robert Aldrich,
Claudia Rossini Goodbye Dragon Inn,
while Margherita Morgantin Je, Tu, Il, Elle by Chantal Akerman.
In a small room characterised by the domestic presence of an open fire,
we find an archive.
The space documents the methods with which the past
had been preserved and transmitted by a heterogenic group of gay and lesbian people
who took part in the laboratory.
The big distinction which organises the environment
is the one between objects belonging to men and women.
From the male side, most of all we see a series of magazines
which impress because of the means they use to re-cast the political language of the 1970s,
in particular the one related to Marxism.
On the women's side instead, there is a series of publications and real books
which to a very limited extent confront the national politics,
but focus rather on the feminist movement.
Upstairs the member of the audience finds him/her self inside a cinema from another time.
In this cinema two projections alternate during the whole day.
In the morning we can see Roussamee Rungjang, a video installation of Arin Rungjang from Thailand.
The video is a long and fixed filming which last about an hour, made by the Dusit Thani Hotel in Bangkok,
where the artist's mother was working.
The movie is silent and it comments on the changeover from day time to night time.
Still on the screen we can read also a series of subtitles
through which Arin's mother tells us about all her life
and in particular the tragic death of her husband.
We can notice that the woman's memory sometimes takes a break, sometimes strays
and somehow this tale, which every time turns increasingly obscure,
finds a mirror in the landscape we are watching.
We wanted to declare right through this video that the exhibition is not just of the body,
as it often happens in other exhibitions which touch this same topic, but rather of a *** vision.
This landscape which slowly darkens, somehow describes a setting
where the identities become gradually more vague even if they are bright, shiny and glossy.
The visual sense is the one that most of all connects our identity to memory,
which is a historical memory, but also and mostly personal.
For the afternoon the program sees the projection of
Welcome Back Dragon Inn, a work by Sabina Grasso, which fits in a series of Chinese boxes Goodbye Dragon Inn
a film by Tsai Ming Liang of 2003.
The movie by the Taiwanese movie-maker takes place in a film setting
while on the screen images scroll down of a famous cloak and dagger film, entitled Dragon Gate Inn (King Hu, 1967).
In the re-made version of the movie, here presented,
Sabina Grasso forces a convergence of time between the two films,
whose duration differs by about 30 minutes.
The narration crumbles inevitably and it ends up scattering the codified logic of the genre.
The movie exits the screen to become performance.
A series of actors, in unspecified moments of the day,
actually reinterpret some moments taken from Goodbye Dragon Inn.
Through this unusual but discrete presence, the audience of the exhibition finds itself in its turn to be actors,
included in a space where beyond mere watching, they have to act.
From this obscure and hybrid cinema space,
we move to a series of side spaces lit in different ways.
The first room we meet is the one of Tomaso De Luca,
artist who already worked on the elaboration of new masculine identity.
In this room time seems almost blocked, some materials cover the windows making them almost ghosts.
De Luca was inspired by an atmosphere that could be the one of a disco club at dawn,
once the place is empty.
In this way he creates a stumbling block for the audience.
The floor is covered by a series of fabrics which make the path vaguely hard.
At the side of the door, hidden in a corner, we find a correspondence which includes texts, drawings and photos.
This very varied material describes a love story between a lion and a little bird.
The artist dismantles, destabilizes, one of the symbols of the power of the Serenissima (Venice in its glorious time):
the winged lion indeed.
The animal is interpreted not as a masculine symbol of dominant power
but rather as a lonely animal looking for its own love.
Carrying on we find the work of Annatina Caprez and Andrea Romano.
On the surface we see some painting on wooden blocks,
which somehow seems to evoke some *** images.
For real, the artists simply took some particulars from the cartoon The Flinstones,
which jokily alludes to an impossible meeting, to a comparison between two different generations,
between two different species.
The work will pass from vertical to horizontal.
In fact the couple of artists, exactly half way through the exhibition, organised a new workshop
that partly tips over the dynamics established during the laboratory of the year before.
In that occasion, those who present themselves as simple paintings
will transform into useful, relational and habitable objects.
Antonio Bigini and Rachele Maistrello choose to concentrate only on one of the men they've met during the workshop:
Luciano, costume designer who boasts a glorious career and an eventful life in the cinema world.
The two artists mix fixed images with moving ones, trying to translate this man's tales into images.
Mixing shots, created on purpose both in analog and digital format,
with sketches and photograms taken from the national archive of family films Home Movies,
the artists create a storyboard which proceeds by free associations between exoticism and refinement.
Still on the way home -this is the name of the installation- is the rewriting by more than one writer,
of someone else's personal story. A loving infidel tale.
As a conclusion of the circle, there are three photos by Sabina Grasso.
The three shots are some sort of set photos about the actors who took part in the artist's performance.
They are not taken inside the exhibitive space but in three significant places of the City's *** life.
What I have found, what I have re-found in the exhibition,
is this continuous fragmentation, of the space most of all.
The place of the exhibition, the place of art's manifestation, is not reduced anymore to its own uniqueness,
but it branches into various spaces with physical aptitudes, physical characteristics, some completely different.
This has also been the content of our meetings during the workshop where,
starting from something, we landed on something entirely different.
This something different wasn't caused by a schizophrenic digression,
but rather by an attraction to what was the energy of the moment in terms of memory,
or also in terms of immediate relationship with the surrounding presence.
Inside this exhibition the use of the rooms of Palazzetto Tito is equally loose,
equally subordinated to those vital reasons,
and less linked to this totalitarian structure that normally art exhibitions of the latest 50 years have.