Cine Fantasma

[Тэкст даступны толькі на англійскай мове] Ghost Cinema is a video intervention and performance series that explores the way symbolic and material structures interlace themselves with urban landscapes. Through audiovisual collages projected on the surfaces and facades of buildings either abandoned or threatened to disappear, it searches for the significance and importance of the memory that constitutes a local identity. Instead of a nostalgic perspective, it explores the outputs of the montage and projection of images, not based on the spectacle or consumption logics, but on the notions of community and belonging. The material used on the projections is assembled collaboratively – by way of workshops, online and offline search engines, interviews or conjuring – incarnating the collective and affective memory of the concerned site. Therefore, it is a series of researches and interventions in specific sites, having taken place between 2013 and 2014 in various cities in Brazil, and in January 2015 in Berlin, Germany, in the context of the Vorspiel/Transmediale Festival. As if some sort of archeology, in the manner that French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, Ghost Cinema pursuits in the ruins, detours and fractures of the past the conditions to the possibility of understanding the present and formulating other futures. With this perspective and a site specific proposition for the Live Performance Meeting 2015 Rome, the work integrates itself to the festival’s call.

Cinema Aquila – today known as Nuovo Cinema Aquila – held the exhibition of many great classics of Italian cinema which contributed to the formation of the collective unconscious around modern Cinema. Placed in the historical working-class neighborhood of Prenestino-Labicano, the old movie theater, restored and restructured by the Comune di Roma, is still a symbol not only of the victory over organized crime, but also against the death of non-multiplex, street movie theaters. In this way, the videointervetion project by Ghost Cinema proposes a dreamlike historical revisionism not only of Nuovo Cinema Aquila, but also of the region it belongs to. According to Pasolini, in Film it is hardest to distinct the “language of prose” to the “the language of poetry” because we can’t clearly understand what is the “language of Film”. Appropriating and remixing images and sounds extracted from some of the main works by Film masters such as Fellini, de Sica and Rosselini, the performance follows the steps of Pasolini through the streets of Pigneto and the Cinema of Poetry. In this spectre of ghostly facts, it will go through the mafia dominance season, the big openings, the crisis started at the end of the 70s, the transformation in a porn movie theater, and the city reappropriation through law 109.

The closing of traditional movie theaters can be observed in multiple cities, either in the Americas or in Europe, and can be related to contexts of crisis in film distribution and exhibiting systems, to the advent of television, home video and the internet, or to the phenomena of real estate speculation. Facing this conclusion, our proposition aims to celebrate the longevity of Cinema Aquila, as a focus of the region’s resistance and an affirmation of its cultural identity. On its webpage, one can read that the “process of restituting the theater to the city is a symbol of democracy and participation”. In this spirit, we propose an intervention that will count with the direct participation of moviegoers, aficionados, enthusiasts, memoirists and defenders of street theaters. Our intent is to incorporate to this remix, in real time, tweets, photos, videos and sounds sent by Internet users through Art MidiaMagia collaborative netplatform, developed in Brazil by artist Denise Agassi, member of Coletivo Fantasma (“ghost collective”) in São Paulo. Our collective in Rome will be composed by Brazilian artist and performer Paola Barreto, as the Master of Ceremonies Dr. Ghost; by British DJ and sound designer David Cole and by Brazilian VJ Lucas Canavarro. As Andre Bazin said once, Cinema is still to be invented. We hope, with this intervention in Cinema Aquila, to contribute with the creation of a live Cinema filled with poetry, invention and resistance.