New film works
29 October–10 December 2011
Opening:
28 October, 6–9 pm
Galerie Campagne Première Berlin
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin
Germany
Tue–Sat 11am–6pm
T +49.30.400 54 300
mail@campagne-premiere.com
www.campagne-premiere.com
Galerie Campagne Première is pleased to present “The Analogue Island,” a new body of film works by Berlin-based Swiss and Italian artist Marco Poloni.
On this occasion, Poloni’s new artist book “Palermo Noir & Yellow,” published by onestar press in Paris, will be launched.
The work of Marco Poloni spans cinema, photography and installation. Over the past several years, the artist has been building an index of plots and problems of the Mediterranean Sea. This archive documents and reformulates a number of geopolitical scripts and narratives of this area, focusing on relations between social invisibility and power, subjectivity and ideology.
In the two films presented, the artist investigates power configurations in Sicily and their effects on its topography. Poloni reads this island—the geographical epicentre of the entire Mediterranean Sea—as a symptom and prototype of nation-wide malgovernance. This analysis also examines the emergence of parasitic power networks at a larger scale.
“Scomparsa delle lucciole,” 2011 (“Disappearance of the Fireflies,” S-16mm film on HD video, 19 min), is an experimental narrative about power relations and entanglements between State and Mafia, set in a devastated region of the island. The film takes its title and its cue from a stark image proposed in 1975 by Pasolini, in an article that analysed power transformations in Italy and anticipated the spectacularization of politics. The film attempts to expand Pasolini’s poetic connection by incorporating the Mafia, the obscure historical companion to State’s power. It articulates a number of concepts and narrative threads: the Mafia as faceless power, its impact on the urban landscape—in particular through unfinished architecture—and Sicily’s relationship to time and expenditure.
“The Analogue Dam,” 2010 (S-16mm film on HD video, 8min30, non synchronous voice-over, 21min), explores the ghostly Sicilian dam of Blufi, one of the most impressive of a series of unfinished works of public architecture in the Italian south. Mismanaged and infiltrated by the Mafia, these uncompleted projects epitomize the difficulties of a certain “South” to take hold of its future, and call into question Robert Smithson’s concept of “ruins in reverse.” The filmic sequence loosely intersects with a voice-over that shifts from one angle to the next: descriptive, historical, political, aesthetic.
Poloni’s new book, “Palermo Noir & Yellow,” is a take on Palermo’s eighties, the so-called “years of lead” in which competing families of Cosa Nostra were engaged in a ruthless war for the control of the city. The book intersperses chronicle photographs found in the archives of Palermo’s leading newspapers with images of artworks and with pictures of fish, shellfish and pasta.
“Scomparsa delle lucciole” was funded by the george foundation (Winterthur), The Contemporary Art Funds of the City and Canton of Geneva, and with the participation of the Alfred Richterich Stiftung (Kastanienbaum), the Stiftung Kunst Heute (Bern), and Cinédokké (Savosa).
