Where and when
Introduced by Eva Francioli, Museo Novecento and Riccardo Lami, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
Speakers Valentina Valentini and Anna Mazzanti
As part of the Bill Viola. Electronic Renaissance in progress until 23 July at Palazzo Strozzi, the Museo Novecento is hosting a conference by Valentina Valentini dedicated to the master of video art.
“I felt the growing need to provide images or visions aimed at the healing process, the possibility of transcending our condition, the process of crossing the threshold. If the whole world is failing and falling apart, I feel the need to raise a perfect world against all of this. If the ego is fragmented, I need to imagine an ego that is not split“. (Bill Viola, 1999)
Bill Viola’s vision of art is far from post-modernist cynical aesthetics. The artist’s task is to transform the world, rather than duplicate it, to connect the individual to a whole that includes it, in which man and nature, life and death are part of a life cycle, something that is transformed incessantly. In Bill Viola’s vast production – ranging from the seventies to the new century – three representative formats are traced: single-channel video and self-portrait; environmental installations that combine time and space; the liquid crystal screens of The Passions cycle. With the cycle inaugurated with The Passions, Viola uses plasma screens and recovers the frame to re-emerge the “unburied images” of Italian painting of the 15th century and the Renaissance. The artist moves from shooting en plein air to building a studio set, from natural landscapes to neutral backgrounds produced by digital technologies – which he calls the technologies of the intangible. A single subject recurs in these works, the human figure that is expressed both as a silhouette immersed in a luminous gaseous material, fluid like water, and as a carnal and “obscene” presence due to the grandeur of the pathetic expressions.
The Passions represents for the artist a further approach towards that inner space that he has always explored with technological devices: sinking into oneself, being close to a mental experience, having the intimate relationship that the reader has with the book with images.
Valentina Valentini is a teacher and scholar of the problems of entertainment in the twentieth century. His research includes the field of interference between theater, art and new media. Among his most recent publications: Nuovo Teatro Made in Italy 1963-2013; Sound dramaturgies. Theaters of the second half of the twentieth century; Worlds, bodies, materials; the two anthologies The practices of video and The stories of video. He edited the first monograph on Bill Viola Bill Viola. Seeing with the mind and with the heart. He has worked on various volumes that analyze authors, works of electronic art and multimedia; his essays have been published in national and international journals. On the occasion of the conference, the volume art / tapes / 22 will be presented.
At the origins of the video experimentation dedicated to the Florentine video production laboratory active from 1973 to 1976 where the young Bill Viola worked alongside numerous international artists. The volume edited by Anna Mazzanti is published by Silvana Editoriale with the support of the Tuscany Region and Maremma in Contemporanea – MIC. Through the voice of the protagonists, in a collection of unpublished texts and some critical essays, the book retraces the art / tapes / 22 season and deepens the relationships and role of the experimental laboratory and its animators with the fervent cultural fabric of the Tuscany of seventies.
On the occasion of the conference, the volume art / tapes / 22. The origins of video art will be presented by Anna Mazzanti, published by Silvana Editoriale with the support of the Tuscany Region and Maremma in Contemporanea – MIC. The volume includes a collection of unpublished texts by the protagonists and critical essays by various authors including Valentina Valentini herself. It retraces the art / tapes / 22 season and the role it played in the lively cultural fabric of Tuscany, and beyond, of the seventies.
Anna Mazzanti
She is a researcher in the History of Contemporary Art at the Milan Polytechnic, Design Department. She deals with contemporary art, environmental art, artistic movements between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, art between the two wars. On behalf of the School of Specialization of the University of Siena, he curated the conference in Follonica (2011) art / tapes / 22 The away laboratory. At the origins of video experimentation in Tuscany.
In collaboration with Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
At the end of the conference, the guests will be given a copy of the volume art/tapes/22. Le origini della videoarte.
Credits: Bill Viola, The Sleep of Reason, 1988. Photo Kira Perov