Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi Dal Polo all’Equatore

101''

Since the early 1980s, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have been creating their films based on archive films, retrieving and exploring the political, historical, and anthropological aspects of the images in movement, and discussing once more the traditional narrative categories. The two artists made Dal Polo all’Equatore based on the archives of the filmmaker and documentary producer Luca Comerio (1878-1940), packed with materials filmed during the period between the two World Wars. We find therein themes such as the journey, exploration, conquest, the cultural and religious submission of the African population, exotic adventure, military and colonial oppression. The artists use an “analytical chamber” made up of two elements: running in the former is the original 35mm film set in motion by hand because of the fragility of the material; the latter, a chamber in axis with the first element, allows for the original image to be photographed again. The film, along with the large drawn “roll” and the four works on paper, raises some essential questions about the relationship between cinema and history: the function of the word and the role of real time (and slow time) in the film, the value of the testimony of documentary images.

No

M. Bertozzi, Aporias of planetary domination. From the Pole to the Equator by Yervant Gianikina and Angela Ricci Lucchi in Senzamargine. Passages in Italian art at the turn of the millennium, curated by B. Pietromarchi, exhibition catalogue, (Rome, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Venice, Marsilio Editori, pp. 125-145

Foto Agostino Osio - Alto Piano

The MAXXI Arte collection also includes four drawings and a rolled paper

Acquisition

Video