Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

The second part of Gianikian’s homage to his life partner Angela Ricci Lucchi. The two films are open diaries, love letters and surveys of the materials which engender their films within a much vaster creative universe as a couple: watercolours, scripts, writings and, above all, a shared life, of which this film is an example. As Gianikian writes: “This film is my memory of Angela […], my desperate attempt to bring her back by my side […], the continuation of our work as an intent […], a type of map to act now that contains guidelines and provides continuation. Angela and I prepared new and important projects to carry out: promise, oath, continuation […]”.

In the 1970s, the artists found ten thousand toys from Eastern Europe, northern Italy, Russia and Japan in a town in the Dolomites. As Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi explain: “[…] from the early twentieth century and having survived two world wars, these dolls, board games and figures made from modest materials evoke the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo: ROBERTO axis. Interrupted childhoods, customs and miniature worlds swept up in the lethal world of totalitarianism”. Ghiro ghiro Tondo is an impressive atlas of early-twentieth-century tools, and also proof of how ideology penetrates children’s worlds and how games survive the most brutal ideologies.

Prigioneri della Guerra is part of War Trilogy, a production which analyses the destruction of the First World War and constitutes one of the most eloquent manifestos against violence and wholesale massacre in military conflict. The title of the film comes from a quote by writer Elias Canetti, who after a public reading of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind (1918) expressed the feeling of being a “prisoner of war”. It is also a description of the people the film depicts: orphans, refugees, deportees, children; namely, the universal victims of war. The images stem from First World War materials conserved in the archives of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, with the diversity of the ethnic groups the film sketches speaking of this conflict as an international phenomenon, as well as the human quality of surviving and enduring catastrophe.

Su tutte la vette è pace is also part of War Trilogy, which analyses the destruction of the First World War and constitutes one of the most eloquent manifestos against violence and wholesale massacre in military conflict. The title of the film comes from Goethe’s Wanderer’s Nightsong (1780), a poem about peace after grief written during a retreat in the mountains: “Over all mountaintops / Is peace / In all treetops / You sense / Barely a breath / The little birds are silent in the woods / Just wait, soon / You too will rest”. The film transports us to a stage of war in the mountains, no longer a manifestation of the sublime and the romantic and now a setting in which the Austrian and Italian armies fight in the First World War to gain territory. The images show an arresting Alpine landscape transformed by war, while Giovanna Marini’s soundtrack musicalises the diaries and letters of soldiers trapped in the conflict and their desire for a swift end to it all.

Oh! Uomo concludes the War Trilogy, which analyses the destruction of the First World War and constitutes one of the most eloquent manifestos against violence and wholesale massacre in military conflict. The title originates from a quote by Leonardo da Vinci on how the mere contemplation of the horrors of war must ignite human awareness; thus the artists seek to show armed conflict in order to prevent it. Through military and medical archive footage, the film compiles portraits of orphaned children — displaced, undernourished, unwell — alongside a broad gallery of veterans with severely mutilated bodies. It forces the viewer to leave aside any indifference to these horrors and is a paradigm in avant-garde film for representing human violence.

Pays barbare narrates, through fragments, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia under Mussolini’s dictatorship. Relayed in chapters, the film uses amateur ethnographic images retrieved from private and anonymous archives and displaced to work to a different rhythm and chromatic tone, resulting in a reflection on the same filmic material and its relationship with history and memory and with cinema and destruction. It also highlights the annihilation of celluloid as a history document, while showing the newly constructed man of totalitarianism massacring the eroticised primitive Other. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s smouldering images not only allude to the long shadow cast by the 1930s today, but also colonial heritage. In the words of both: “[…] the barbaric land in question is not confined to the background of history; it continues to lurk ominously on current European landscapes under the name of Ceuta, Melilla and Lampedusa”.

A journey through history and film. Dal polo all'equatore explores the act of forgetting and remembering from materiality and the re-editing of celluloid from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The images come from the footage shot by Luca Comerio (Italy, 1878–1940), a pioneer of Italian cinema, in which the birth of the twentieth century is shown. Dal polo all'equatore is also the title of a documentary Comerio made which celebrates the achievements of European colonialism and most of all Italian fascism as a fitting ideology to conquer and shape the world. Hunting, exotism, speleology, sport, war and the exalted body combine to celebrate the success of fascist power. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi re-edit this footage, expounding the ideology inscribed in the images. The fragile state of the material bestows it with a sensitive layer of abstraction, and the work is a profound reflection on time, memory and the ruin of history.

In the artists’ own words: “After our films were screened in the Museo Reina Sofía [in 2014], we searched for materials in our archive related to the Civil War, and also from periods that were prior, parallel and subsequent to the ‘event’. All were elements on film in and from different formats and sources. The first to be selected was a film in a Lumière format with two round perforations per frame from the late nineteenth century, of one metre approximately, where two characters, a man and a woman, appear: ‘Spanish dance’. The work is a search through the century’s history: the First World War, Spanish soldiers in Galicia, on the borders of the Russian Empire, 35mm. The Second World War shows Spanish volunteers alongside Nazis in Russia and North Africa […]. Where’s Francisco Franco?”.

The film will be on a loop within the same-titled installation as part of the exhibition Machinations, running from 21 June to 28 August 2023, inside Space 2 of the Sabatini Building.