REMIX

On the web, you can find tutorials on how to build something, no matter the subject; on how to cook any kind of food, video reviews on whatever object, remedies on how to fix a broken washing machine or the hole in your socks; you can find tutorials on how to produce a mask to protect yourself from Covid or on how to convert a fruit crate into a piece of furniture. You can find music videos from very famous bands as well as from local groups; historical films as well as amateur short films, public speeches by presidents of whatever organization, as well as speeches by the mayors of tiny municipalities; folk festivals and birthday parties, scientific videos, NASA video live from outer space, and hacked security camera recordings. We could keep going like this forever. In short, it’s a giant melting pot, billions and billions of hours of videos that everyone can have access to, wherever there is an Internet connection.
If you type “Twin Towers” on the Google Video section, you will have 58,300 videos coming up; if you type “G8 Genoa/July 2001”, you will have 30,100 of them; if you typed “Covid-19” at the end of August 2020, you would have had even 2,010,000,000 videos. This gives us a glimpse into how audio-visual production has been changing in the last 20 years, but also some useful information about the archive role played by a daily tool like YouTube. To sum up, we are in front of an endless archive which is, in a disorderly manner, witness of events, historical moments, small stories, changes in the self-relationship and much more. You just need to find an order.

For many years now, L’Ambulante has been dealing with archives and “edited” films production starting from archival materials (Rondò final, 2021) and also with the spreading of a certain kind of archive-based cinema. All this is achieved through research projects which have involved family film, anthropologists, and historic archives (Video Portraits in Sardinia, 2017/2018; Second-Hand cinema, 2018/2019; Assembling and Disassembling Imaginaries, 2019/2020). L’Ambulante also organizes the “Second-Hand Cinema” film festival, which reached its third edition in 2021.

We have started a new experimental research, through which we want to explore and consider the web as an archive of pre-existing materials, reasoning on the media representations that these materials create by conveying specific messages and events of the contemporary world. Through a remix, we have attempted one or more than one deconstructions of these stories, in order to recreate critical interpretations of the representation of the present time.

We have therefore involved a mixed group of artists, filmmakers, and sound artists; after having first shared a workshop moment all together, we have asked them to realize some pieces of artwork by using materials mainly coming from the Web (Instagram stories, YouTube videos, Facebook videos, institutional videos, family film footages, fragments taken from institutional archives, political statements, etc.) that could, all together, raise questions going beyond the general theme addressed in the single fragment. A process of meditation, experimentation and therefore creation (Remix to be precise), which is also a reflection on cinema and media. Each of the involved artists has dealt with the archive, following a common guideline which can be summed up by the concept of “EVENT”.

Starting from these individual artworks, we have dismantled, reassembled and realized a new one, a collective one. A Remix of the Remix.

The authors involved are: Carolina Valencia Caicedo, Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Riccardo Giacconi, Alessandro Penta, and Vittoria Soddu.

Listed below are the artworks created (4 short films, one audio documentary and one collective work):

CARTA URGENTE (URGENT PAPER)
by Alberto Diana (short film)

May 2021. Colombia takes to the streets; the police respond by opening fire. I observe the barricades from another continent: the videos and the witnesses of all those friends who remained in Medellín give voice to a country which doesn’t surrender and brings back memories that seemed to be gone.

CORPO A CORPO (CLOSE COMBAT)
by Alessandro Penta (short film)

Twenty years later, there is a wood next to that hill. This is the place of that memory, so difficult to reconstruct. On the screen instead, everything appears in just a few moments, with its codes and its new symbols. Everything is exposed, engraved, even the aggression, the challenge, the fight. It’s a close combat between a memory and a vision, between a long-gone grief and the one flowing in a loop on the screen. It’s a body-to-body combat where the body doesn’t exist any longer. What is left is a story.

1871–1986
by Luca Carboni (short film)

The brutal repression of the Paris Commune (the swan song of the century of revolutions in Europe) on one side and the triumphal entry of the artificial intelligence into our civilization on the other side, paving the way for the neoliberalism and to its claim to be the last guardian of History.

Two apparently disconnected moments, which have marked, each in its own way, the establishment of a hegemonic model whose continuity can be found in our highly media-centered everyday life. The blind trust in technology (going from the modern boulevard of Baron Haussmann, allowing the royal army to destroy the resistance of the Commune in a few days, to the information systems allowing the US police to give a name and a face to a fingerprint in just a few minutes) is the main thread of this short film, where images, brutally overlapped, reveal the derision, the disapproval, and the encouraging violence of a face which becomes in a natural way the common sense symbol of an increasingly uncivilized age.

INSTRUCTIONS NOT INCLUDED
by Vittoria Soddu (short film)

The instructions are not supplied to whom is watching and listening. This remix wants to recall a part of the videogame storyline, focusing on the text (the instruction indeed) that leads the moves of the protagonist of this versatile game through several settings and goals to reach. The protagonist always embodies a character who bumps into a riddle to solve. The necessity of the average player changes and is manifested in the narrative developed by programmers and game designers, since the very first videogames which are pretty textual and where the evolution of your own character is not visible at first, but it exists in the imagination of the game leader.

DOMINIO PUBBLICO (PUBLIC DOMAIN)
by Carolina Valencia and Riccardo Giacconi (audio documentary)

This is an audio series of 5 episodes, lasting 20 minutes each and based on events occurred in the recent history of Italy. We want to use the materials that you can find on the internet to create a counter-tale of these events; by using the materials which are available online on YouTube, on RAI (Italian state broadcaster), on the Radio Popolare and Radio Radicale (Italian radio stations) websites. There is no voice leading this material, only editing. The first episode is dedicated to the Macerata gunfire attack, which occurred on the 3rd of February 2018. A 28-year-old man, named Luca Traini, out of the blue decided to try to kill all the people of colour that he could find on the street. This fact has become a public show to record. On the internet there are many images of him in front of the war memorial, wrapped by the Italian flag on his shoulders, his hand in the air making the Fascist salute. This event happened during the political election campaign in 2018.

Remix – Remix
by AA.VV (Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Riccardo Giacconi, Alessandro Penta, Vittoria Soddu, Carolina Valencia, Gaetano Crivaro, Felice D’Agostino, Arturo Lavorato, and Margherita Pisano)

A collective work achieved by dismantling and reshaping the artwork by artists Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Riccardo Giacconi, Alessandro Penta, Vittoria Soddu, and Carolina Valencia, realized for the “REMIX” project. The result is a new visionary, heterogeneous and highly contemporary artwork.

REMIX
Possible compositions among archives, web, social media, and media representations.

Research and experimentation project by L’Ambulante
Conceived and coordinated by: Gaetano Crivaro e Margherita Pisano
With: Arturo Lavorato e Felice D’Agostino
Artists: Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Riccardo Giacconi, Alessandro Penta, Vittoria Soddu, Carolina Valencia Caicedo
Partner: Società Umanitaria – Cineteca Sarda di Cagliari / DADU – Dipartimento Architettura Design e urbanistica – UNISS
With the contribution of: Regione Autonoma della Sardegna