FOTOGRAMMI IN DISSOLVENZA
Se la realtà non è solo un fotogramma ideally closes with dissolving film frames from two videos: AlessandraFerrini’s essay film Negotiating Amnesia and Jacopo Rinaldi’s video installation Light Meter.
These two works focus, in very different ways, on the theme of memory, and of forgetting or questionino history, as a highly sensitive potential ideological tool.
Ferrini’s documentary addresses the issue of telling the story of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa between the war in Ethiopia in 1935-36 and its historic reconstruction in contemporary Italy. The artist asks how ideologies and manipulation still affect Italians’ collective image of the country’s early twentieth-century colonial past and how we preserve and pass on memories, revealing intentional amnesia and partial reconstruction of events and stories.
Rinaldi’s work, on the other hand, is a wider-ranging consideration of vision, of images of our history (and art history) and our mechanisms of vision and construction of the image. The artist photographs the technical systems used in some of Rome’s bestknown churches to light up paintings in sculptures for a limited time, resulting in a constant alternation of light and dark, image and censorship. The result is an apparent metaphor for the action of history itself: the voluntary action of the present, turning on a light which is inevitably destined to go off, casting even the most important masterpieces of western art into the darkness of oblivion.
