Premiere of Anna Franceschini​, BUSTROFEDICO

Enrico David, Chiara Fumai, Liliana Moro
Neither Nor: The challenge to the Labyrinth
May 11–November 24, 2019
Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019
Arsenale, Venice, Italy

The Italian Pavilion is promoted by the The Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism and represents the national participation at the 58th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Neither Nor: The challenge to the Labyrinth curated by Milovan Farronato.

On Saturday, November 23, at 8pm the short film BUSTROFEDICO created by Anna Franceschini and produced by In Between Art Film and Gluck50 will be shown in the Santa Margherita Auditorium at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The video is a special project, which documents the exhibition Neither Nor: The challenge to the Labyrinth, curated by Milovan Farronato and featuring the work of Enrico David, Chiara Fumai and Liliana Moro, for the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Artist and filmmaker Anna Franceschini (born in Pavia, 1979) has been called upon to answer a seminal question: how can one create a labyrinthine film? The answer involves having to develop a series of traps and tricks. To achieve this, Franceschini has turned the actual Pavilion into a grand viewing machine that is a cinematographic device in itself. Here, the display acts as a spatial and temporal scene, while the film offers its own spatial experience.

Writing that changes direction on each line is called “boustrophedon.” It goes from left to right, then from right to left, and so on. On the “return routes” even individual letters are written in reverse. The term comes from the Greek adverb, which means “like oxen ploughing a field.” It is this idea that, from the very beginning, has given shape to the exhibition’s cinematic interpretation. The film BUSTROFEDICO tests the boundaries of cinematographic genres, beginning with the documentary genre. It constructs a “gender-less” (“genre-less,” cinematographically speaking) and free-flowing piece that might be similar to a thriller.

Anna Franceschini tells: “At the heart of the labyrinth lies a mystery which, when you take into consideration the film’s desperation to chase the Steadicam and present all sorts of obstacles, doesn’t seem to want to be revealed. The spaces in the Pavilion have been partly re-designed or hidden from view and extended beyond it, so that its contents are let loose. The aim is to lose track, to leave the viewer with no coordinates, continually subjected to comings and goings, to subversions of subject matter, repetitions, accelerations and slowdowns, journeys that perhaps lead to the same point, but with subtle differences.

The boustrophedonic machine relentlessly continues to turn on itself, to cross over itself, to try to transcend itself. BUSTROFEDICO is tension through images. It cannot make its mind up; it looks back nostalgically and ahead curiously. BUSTROFEDICO could be a parade or a litany, just like the Bardo Thodol which indeed inspired it. The Bardo, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a collection of texts that describe visions of what might happen after death. And what might happen is a gradual detachment from the perceptible world, which is still gently seductive, but becomes increasingly bizarre and less recognisable.”

BUSTROFEDICO takes place in the interstitial space of the “film display,” a hybrid which Franceschini has been exploring in her most recent research and which makes the various characteristics of the documentation its own, as the artist combines and interlaces them with some aesthetic techniques specific to the exhibition design and the methods of exhibiting items. In this way, the film doesn’t just become one of the devices that contribute to the memory of the Pavilion itself, but it simultaneously acts as one of its tools for analysis and critique.