Between analogue resistance and digital culture
Workshop consisting of 6 meetings and 1 practical session
The meetings
Following the workshops held in recent years and dedicated to music video directors and Italian animators, this third series is dedicated to experimental filmmakers and video artists who, from the late 1970s to the present day, have innovated the kinetic medium through meticulous work on the device, whether electronic (such as Sambin’s “videoloop”, which marks an early phase of experimentation) or analogue (Super 8 in the case of Arcangelo Mazzoleni, 16 mm in its various process stages by the Doria-Guadagnuolo duo, and 35 mm adopted by di Martino).
At the heart of the six meetings will be, above all, a historical-aesthetic reflection on a wide range of practices, from artisanal ones linked to film to digital ones in the realm of post-production. These creative practices, in many cases, are not mutually exclusive as a result of a choice made by the artists, but rather coexist, according to a logic that can, on a case-by-case basis, involve “remediation”, reworking or rethinking of the images.
The topics addressed will include the relationship between static (photographic) and moving (video) images, which can be seen, for example, in the work of Antonello Matarazzo; the combination of documentary, narrative and experimentation; and the creation of multi-channel installations that involve a redefinition of the viewing space itself by the viewer, including through immersive, interactive approaches linked to the use of machines or AI (as in the case of Francesca Fini).
During the sessions, the creators will present a selection of their audiovisual works.
The workshop
Immediately after the morning sessions with the artists, the filmmakers will lead a workshop that will explore technical aspects, using Super 8, 16 mm, videotape and digital formats, and will involve creating some found-footage films from pre-existing materials. Access will be limited to a maximum of 20 people due to space constraints and to ensure that the activity can be carried out in the best possible way. The workshop will be supervised by Prof. Giancarlo Torri.
The workshop and the studio are linked to the artistic production and research project for the 2025-2026 academic year entitled DATAVERSI, which is dedicated to the theme of the archive, explored in all its facets and in the various fields of expression and communication (from moving images to the web to the visual arts). In this sense, all the creators will be asked to reflect during the sessions on their relationship with the concept of the archive, as well as on the various ways of appropriating and reworking pre-existing images.
Each session will last 4 hours.
Students who attend the entire series will be awarded 1 CFA.
The workshop will last 4 hours.
Students who attend the workshop will be awarded 1 additional CFA
First meeting – 21 March
Arcangelo Mazzoleni
Second meeting – 11 April
Michele Sambin
Third meeting – 18 April
Rä di Martino
Fourth meeting – 9 May
Rä di Martino
Fifth meeting – 16 May
Salvatore Insana
Sixth meeting – 23 May
Francesca Fini
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE ARTISTS
Rä di Martino was born in Rome in 1975 and has lived in London since 1997, where she completed a Master’s degree at the Slade School of Art. In 2005, she moved to New York, initially with the New York Prize. She works primarily as a visual artist, focusing on the language of film/video and photography. She has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad at institutions such as PS1 in New York, Palazzo Grassi, the Fondazione Sandretto, MACRO in Rome, Mart in Rovereto, HANGARBicocca, Montevideo Netherlands Media Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Bronx Museum and Artists Space NY, as well as exhibitions such as the Busan Biennale, the Turin Triennale and Manifesta. She has also taken part in numerous international film festivals, including the Locarno Film Festival, the Turin Film Festival, the Dutch Impakt Film Festival, Les Urbaines in Lausanne, the Viper Kunstifilmbiennale (Basel), Transmediale in Berlin, the New York Underground Film Festival, Vila do Conde, Les Recontres in Paris/Madrid/Berlin and the Kassel Video & Doc Festival. Her first monographic catalogue was published in 2011.
Tiziano Doria and Samira Guadagnuolo Their work, carried out under the name of the production company they founded, Warshadfilm, is based on practices related to the processes of analogue photography and film on celluloid. This is closely linked to the search for a form and a language that find a conceptual and poetic correspondence in the processes and technical possibilities of the tools used. The reciprocity between image and word and the search for an isomorphism between the visual and the auditory are of great importance. They have created several film installations, short films and photographic collections, and have also worked with photographic and film archives. They have been invited to various international film festivals, including the Locarno Film Festival and the Turin Film Festival. Their films include: La zita, L’albume d’oro and Festa nuziale.
Francesca Fini (Rome, 1970) is an interdisciplinary artist who, for many years, has been working in that liminal space where the visual arts hybridise, generating a new synthesis precisely in the language of contemporary performance. She has created numerous audiovisual works (animations, documentaries and video performances), including: Immortali (2006), The Mirror (2010), Blood (2011), Virus (2011), A Love Letter (2015), Dadaloop (2015), Gold/looking for Oz (2016). Over the years, the artist has performed and exhibited her work at MACRO in Rome, the Manege Museum in St Petersburg, the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, the Tese dell’Arsenale in Venice, in Toronto for the FADO Performance Art Festival, in Chicago for the Rapid Pulse Festival, in Belo Horizonte for the FAD Festival De Arte Digital, in São Paulo and Rio for the FILE Electronic Language International Festival, in Madrid for IVHAM and the Proyector Festival, in Mumbai for Kala Ghoda and in Tokyo for the Japan Media Arts Festival. In 2014 and 2016, she was selected by Bob Wilson to take part in the artist-in-residence programme at the Watermill Center in New York and, subsequently, invited to the Milan Triennale for a Watermill event at the Illy Art Lab. In February 2016, after a year in production, she completed the experimental feature film Ofelia non annega. She has been working with artificial intelligence in all its forms for many years.
Antonello Matarazzo (Avellino, 1962) is a painter, director and video artist. His work falls within the latest trend (“Medialism”), understood as the integration of various media (photography, painting, video, etc.). Since 2000, the year of his first short film, The Fable (18th Bellaria Film Festival), his videos have been screened at numerous Italian and international film festivals (Venice Film Festival, Festival Cinéma Méditerranéen Montpellier, Clermont-Ferrand, Turin Film Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, Invideo, Locarno, etc.), some of which, such as the Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema, the Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata and Signes de Nuit in Paris, have held retrospectives of his work. The core of his research is based on the ambiguity between still images and movement, often introducing micromovements into photographic images through morphing and warping techniques, but the common thread between painting, video and video installations is his marked inclination to explore introspective and anthropological aspects.
Arcangelo Mazzoleni (Catania, 29 June 1953) is a filmmaker-photographer, essayist, poet and playwright. A graduate in modern and contemporary literature from Sapienza University and a graduate in directing and screenwriting from the CSC, he works in the spirit of total art, creating a multidisciplinary body of work in which the various genres interpenetrate. In 1994, the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica-Calcografia, under the patronage of the Ministry of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him: Arcangelo Mazzoleni: Il mondo al fuoco dello sguardo. Film, Photography, Video, Drawings and Mixed Media on Paper. He teaches film language at the Tor Vergata University of Rome and at ACT Multimedia, part of Cinecittà Holding, and creative writing on RAI’s Screenwriting Training Courses. In 2012, he opened the Higher Education School for Film and Television Screenwriters at the Casa del Cinema, of which he is, together with Mariella Buscemi, director and lecturer. At the same time, he works as a director of cultural programmes (Rai Tre, Rai Storia, Rai Educational, etc.). He is also a prolific film writer, with studies on language (The movement of the camera. Technical aesthetics and the language of the variable frame, 2004) and on the relationship between the visual arts, literature and film movements: Avanguardia sovietica, 2010. His films have entered the art collections of the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) of the Venice Biennale and the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome.
Michele Sambin (Padua, 1951). A filmmaker, musician, painter, sculptor, theatre practitioner and pioneer of video experimentation, he has always pursued research that focuses on the relationship between image and sound, exploring its forms with the help of various expressive and technical media: cinema. Between 1968 and 1977, he made a number of experimental films with which he took part in international events (Filmstudio, Knokke-Heist, La Rochelle and Beaubourg), including Blud’acqua (1972) and Film a strisce (1976). From 1974 onwards, videotape became his main medium for creating performances, often musical, as well as installations and tape works. He innovated the video loop device and reflected on the ephemeral nature of the electronic image. His works include: Autoritratto per quattro camere (1977), Looking for Listening (1977), Il tempo consuma (1979), Anche le mani invecchiano (1979). In 1980, together with Pierangela Allegro and Laurent Dupont, he founded TAM teatromusica, for which he was responsible for direction, sets and music. For many years, Sambin also worked with inmates at Padua Prison. In 2021, the Castromediano Museum in Lecce dedicated a major solo exhibition to him, in which Sambin presented some of his older and more recent works, alongside reworked and updated versions of some of his historical pieces, such as Il tempo consuma (Time Consumes). He has lived in the Salento countryside for many years.
In 2011, Salvatore Insana and Elisa Turco Liveri founded the Dehors/Audela collective, producing – in a constant effort to transcend “conventional” genres, venues and instruments – theatrical works, audiovisual research projects, urban installations and experimental workshops. Pursuing his research in the visual arts, performing arts and other forms of revision and erosion of the imaginary, he has collaborated with numerous musicians and sound artists (including Simone Pappalardo, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, Giulia Vismara and Jacob Kirkegaard). His works have been presented at numerous festivals and multidisciplinary exhibition events in Italy and abroad (FabbricaEuropa, KilowattFestival, TeatriDiVetro, MediaArtFestival, LugoContemporanea, Traverse-Video, Vafa Macao, Ivhm Madrid, Image contre Nature, NIFF – Naoussa, Seeing Sound, Videoholica, 9hundred project, Current Santa Fe, FIVA Buenos Aires, WestVirginiaShortFilmFestival, Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, AsoloArtFilmFestival, LuccaFilmFestival, Avvistamenti, Magmart, Fonlad, PesaroFilmFestival, Festival de la Imagen). Salvatore Insana is one of the artists invited to take part in the project 100X100=900 (100 video artists to tell a century), and is included in the catalogues of Visual Container, the Italian video art platform, P’Silo, the video library of the Image contre Nature festival (Marseille), the Collectif Jeune Cinema (Paris), the Arte Alter Collection, the online collection of KaosArt, Avilés, Spain, and Tao-Films, the on-demand platform curated by Nadin Mai.