The variational mode: three cases about documents, artworks and animation
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Riccardo Giacconi
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The artistic practice of Riccardo Giacconi deals with documents and, more specifically, with the use and the exploration of their narrative potential. This dissertation is about three different cycles of artworks Giacconi produced as part of the research project. The notion of animation inheres in each of the three case studies: – Case 1 focuses on my artworks about Simone Pianetti (1858-?), an Italian mass murderer who escaped and disappeared, and who then became a puppet character, animated as a stock character.– Case 2 focuses on Augusto Masetti (1888-1966), an Italian soldier who shot at his superior officer and declared not to remember having done it, as if in a state of ecstatic possession, as if animated by an external entity. Mainly using publications and workshops, Giacconi produced a series of artworks related to legal, medical and anarchist records on his case.– Case 3 follows the appearance of a puppet character in Colombia, el espiritado, and its supposed connections to the Masetti case. Giacconi describes a series of artistic works the author produced, starting from a puppet script about the self-destruction of a village, which can be read as a commentary on puppetry, anarchism and animation.
Duncan Higgins- Down on the farm
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Duncan Higgins
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Higgins, D. Down On The Farm (DOTF)- 2015 ongoing.
Artefacts produced in collaboration, partnership and financial support with Latvian National Museum of Art Riga, Lithuanian National museum of Art Kaunas, Latvian and Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Solovky State Museum Reserve Russia and ACE.
DOTF is being critically evaluated through a series of one-person exhibitions, publications, web presence and education programme that builds on previous research ‘unloud’ 2004 -2014. DOTF is using artistic research to articulate and contribute to the dialectic narratives that are forming from the legacy of particular Soviet histories. It asks how the ‘image’ and the act of ‘making images’ combined with ‘where the image performs’ can offer ways to question, negotiate, communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in direct reference to specific cultural narratives. This is situated through an ongoing unique study of The Solovki archipelago in north Russia, site of the most sacred founding Russian Orthodox monastery that was also Stalin’s ‘mother’ of Russian gulags and inter-related narrative historical episodes. DOTF utilises practice based artistic research and autoethnographic methods to explore and contests how to (re) integrate artefacts and actions through art into historically active conversations concerning specific contemporary narrative experiences of violence, displacement and testimony.
The work articulates with contemporary questions of ethics and representation addressed in particular by the Russian painter Borisov, filmmakers Goldovskaya, M and Goddard, JL and theorists Herling,G Agamben,G, Arendt,H, Applebaum,A, Alexsevich,S and Didi-Huberman,G. The distinctive contribution of DOTF to this debate is to situate painting in relation to the contested role of documentary photography and film-making, both through the process by which it came about, and its form when presented. Utilising polyphonic narrative structures and numerous interwoven material montages to contest indexical or capricious documentary facts.