Chroniques du sentiment politique

exhibition at Médiathèque
15 January - 26 March 2016

opening 14 January, 6 pm
introduction by Annamaria Licciardello

with films by Alvaro Bizzarri, Jean-Luc
Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Anna Lajolo
and Guido Lombardi, Videobase, as well as a study for a film by Gilles Aubry

screening of I blues. Cronache del sentimento politico, by Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi, every hour from 11 a.m. on

screening of Lo stagionale, by Alvaro Bizzarri, every hour from 11:30 a.m. on

How can images translate, express or even arouse political passions? How, as they follow the singular, critical and revolutionary trajectories of these affective responses, can audiovisual media be mobilized on behalf of popular struggles and actively intervene in the context in which they operate in order not merely to represent but to transform it? Many film-makers and artists have attempted to answer these questions by enlisting moving images in an urgent call to take action, to get involved. It is this "political sentiment" that innervates all of the films and videos included in this program, most of them shot in the decade following the Portapak’s arrival at the end of the 1960s. This program is especially concerned with political sentiment that leads to the radicalization and renewal of film forms by detaching them from genre conventions, by freeing them from the traditional economic system of production. Like the episodes that make up I blues. Cronache del sentimento politico (1975) by Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi, the films and videos in the program converse with, reflect and acknowledge one another in diverse and oblique ways. Tracking the modulations of this sentiment as it crosses from one practice to another to create correspondences between different times, the program questions the established divisions that structure the economy of film image production and thus explores the passages between cinema and video, fiction and documentary, the real and the imaginary – between politics and artistic experimentation.


curated by Annamaria Licciardello, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo


–
credits
stills from Lottando la vita (Videobase, 1975) and from I blues. Cronache del sentimento politico (Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi, 1975)