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Projection of "Twisted Realism", a film by Raphael Cuomo & Maria Iorio at the 54th Venice Biennale, sound mix by Gilles Aubry.
TWISTED REALISM
Twisted Realism takes Pasolini’s film Mamma Roma (1962) as a case study to investigate the period of reconstruction and “economic miracle” in Italy. A polyphony of voices recounts the scenario of the film as well as different aspects of its production and diffusion, which manifest political moments within the broader cinematic agency. The video revisits some shooting locations of Mamma Roma and embodies a new geography of contemporary Rome and its historical and present peripheries. It investigates various “aesthetics of reality” in the cinematographic depictions of the urban development of the INA-Casa Tuscolano district, a large-scale social housing project built between 1950 and 1960, and deconstructs the propagandistic logics of a series of “documentary” films that promoted both the government plans and a new expression of citizenship. Twisted Realism manifests the institutional and legal frameworks of the current commercial exploitation of Mamma Roma to question the privatization of culture and the monopolization of the mediascape as well as a certain mode of writing national history. It uncovers the power relationships and state violence that gave a decisive influence to Pasolini’s project behind the present mercantile discourses on the “glorious Italian art cinema of the 1960s”.
CHEWING THE SCENERY
| 54th Venice Biennale
2nd Live-Events Program 7–10 September 2011 and Exhibition
Teatro Fondamenta Nuove,
Cannaregio 5013, Venezia
