Centre for Contemporary Culture at Palazzo Strozzi
Palazzo Strozzi
SPECIAL EVENT Schermo dell’arte / A Film in a Book
Sunday, November 17, 12:00pm – free admission
Within the Unstable Territory exhibition, CCC Strozzina, Florence
Lo schermo dell’arte Film Festival
Presents as part the program of the Festival Talks 2013
“A Film in a Book. Travel Experiences of Humboldt Books “
In collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
The speakers will be Giovanna Silva, Editorial director of Humboldt Books,
and Barbara Casavecchia, Curator and Contributing Editor of Frieze Magazine
What does it mean for an artist to travel? And how does the journey become part of his or her work?
In the meeting on Sunday, November 17 at 12pm at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence), Giovanna Silva and Barbara Casavecchia present the editorial project Humboldt Books, initiated in Milan in 2012, a series of artist’s books dedicated to the meaning and importance of the journey in terms of experience and knowledge in contemporary art practice.
During the presentation, a first-time preview of excerpts from the film Congo Kings by Carsten Höller will be shown, to which one of the next titles in the series will be dedicated. Also being presented will be the first, already-released volume, Simon Starling, Black Drop Ciné-roman, the editorial project based on the film Black Drop, which will be screened at Lo schermo dell’arte Film Festival on Friday, November 15 (Odeon Cinema, 9pm).
The film traces a relationship between astronomy and the use of the technology of the moving image found in early cinema, starting from the transit of Venus across the sun that occurred in 2012. With a film crew, Starling travelled to Hawaii and Tahiti to observe and film the transit of Venus at the sites of previous observations. The book, Black Drop Ciné-roman, co-published by Humboldt Books and Modern Art Oxford, is a sort of photo-novel that reconstructs the film frame by frame, where the words of the voiceover come to act as a commentary for the images, depicting the relationship between astronomy, photography and the technology of the moving image, in a story of epic journeys and long distances.
Humboldt is a publishing house specializing in travel narratives inspired by the scientific explorations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It gathers together multidisciplinary experiences, uniting different forms of knowledge and techniques to recount voyages and landscapes via an attentive, unconventional gaze. The meeting on the 17th will also be an opportunity to present the second volume in the series: Haris Epaminondas, Chapters.
This event is a reaffirmation of the collaboration between the Schermo dell’arte Film Festival and the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, who hosts the meeting in the context of the exhibition Unstable Territory. Borders and Identity in Contemporary Art (11 October 2013-19 January 2014), which showcases works by international artists that encourage visitors to reconsider the notion of territory in a contemporary world. Photographs, videos and installations spark reflections on the notion of the border as discovery or barrier, on the hybridisation between cosmopolitism and territorial claims, on the figure of the artist himself as traveller, nomad or experimenter teetering on the edge of physical and symbolic territories.
The talk will be held in Italian
Free admission subject to available seating
Info: T. 055.2645155 / www.strozzina.org / www.schermodellarte.org
image: Simon Starling
Black Drop, 2012
Film still
35 mm film transferred to HD
Courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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