Giuseppe Spina

During a workshop, the LABA students together with Giulia Mazzone and Giuseppe Spina discover the collection of cinema machines kept by the Museo dell’Industria del Lavoro in Brescia. This visit becomes the leitmotif of a series of thoughts on technological development and on the imaginary of the infinite machine.

At Bologna’s Specola Tower, 1932–1957, an optical technology was invented which would revolutionize astronomy. The tower’s four floors were perforated and a series of hexagonal mirrors was installed at its base, creating a giant telescope of 2×24 meters. A mobile camera was set at right angles to the mirrors and thousands of glass plates where exposed which offered a systematic overview of the city’s zenithal sky. Thirty years of research were necessary for the astronomer Guido Horn D’Arturo to invent the specchio a tasselli—also called multimirror or segmented mirror—an archetype of today’s most advanced telescopes. Horn D’Arturo’s photographic plates are now also full of spots and traces of deteriorated emulsions. This film is composed of scans and blow-ups of these plates.

A figure hardly emerges from an undefined black space. Màcula has vague contours, lives in the darkness as best he can, his nervous system is unhooked, acrobatic toward the dissolution.

In 2000, group of Romani people of Kosovan origins settled at the foot of Mount Etna. This film depicts a dance dedicated to a bride, a young woman who prepare herself to become wife and mother, the center of a culture. A film as an 'objet trouvé', a show without a show, full of details and life.

“Impressio in-urbe” goes through the textures of the urban space: the materiality of architectures, corners and prospectives, the drawings of pavings, the squares, the bricks; it’s a detailed decomposition of the city’s “cloak” from which the broken matter emerges, seemingly immovable but in a continuous connection, in the centuries, inhabited by its moltitude.”Impressio” is the print, the mark which all things and every gesture leave of itself, the “identikit” (and vivisection) of the city’s space and time, which gives back to us its view.

Jazz for a Massacre is a tribute to experimental artist and filmmaker Nato Frascà. A musical-pictorial jam-session where Noise of Trouble’s jazz improvisation combines with the abstract forms created by Leonardo Carrano directly and the editing of Giuseppe Spina. Made with 20000 painted, engraved and etched frames.

The greek word “zauma” means the angst for the unpredictability of becoming. We often translate it into “wonder”, but this is an improper definition. To assert, like Aristotle did, that every knowledge and every technique come from the wonder is not enough. For Homer, zauma is Polyphemus eating the Odysseus’ comrades, that is to say that it means something more strong and negative than “wonder”. Homeric poems evoke an eerie monstrosity. As it has provoked the whole knowledge and philosophy, zauma is generally intended to be the anguished terror in front of world’s becoming. (E. Severino)

One hundred years since the Mexican Revolution and two hundred years since the independence. Thousands of victims from drug trafficking in a country amongst the most dangerous in the world. Indigenous peoples struggling for dignity, Marxists against imperialism, pharmacies selling cigarettes, 50% of the population dying of starvation, the Zapatista Movement shuts itself off from the outside world, the left is fragmented, the jeopardized right governs. The mixture of vitality and atrocities mark a volatile and yet brewing social situation. Crossing Mexico becomes a political reflection in a sense, both historical and anthropological. Without stopping, the words and images of this film are woven into concepts and feelings, creating a continuous flow, a domino effect in the chain of the contemporary human condition.

An expressionist reflection on a country's future. The 'l'homme du 4 aout' is former President Sankara, the 'African Che Guevara' who changed the name of Upper Volta on 4 August 1984 to Burkina Faso. His Marxist mission failed, the country is still searching.

Même père même mère is the subjective fresco of an African state, it’s an existential research that moves from the conjunction of cinema as movement to travel as movement and vice-versa.

In the hills at the foot of Mount Etna, three people plan an attack on an undefined institutional centre in Sicily. Their aim: to make the island independent of Italy. A local functionary, with the same ideas in mind, is delighted by this news and organises a meeting. In the meantime, an unfortunate traveling salesman becomes involved in all of this. But the story has a surprising ending.

In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.

In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.

In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.

In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.