Riccardo Giacconi

The filmmaker spent a year at Atelier Colla, one of the world’s largest and oldest puppet theatres, which has existed for some 300 years and houses over 3,000 puppets. In reverse chronology, the film – which was written by an artificial neural network – depicts the rituals of the puppeteers.

The filmmaker spent a year at Atelier Colla, one of the world’s largest and oldest puppet theatres, which has existed for some 300 years and houses over 3,000 puppets. In reverse chronology, the film – which was written by an artificial neural network – depicts the rituals of the puppeteers.

The filmmaker spent a year at Atelier Colla, one of the world’s largest and oldest puppet theatres, which has existed for some 300 years and houses over 3,000 puppets. In reverse chronology, the film – which was written by an artificial neural network – depicts the rituals of the puppeteers.

The filmmaker spent a year at Atelier Colla, one of the world’s largest and oldest puppet theatres, which has existed for some 300 years and houses over 3,000 puppets. In reverse chronology, the film – which was written by an artificial neural network – depicts the rituals of the puppeteers.

A. is obsessed with his image. Like a post-modern Narcissus, he projects himself in the endless choices that social media devices offer him. Riccardo Giacconi creates a disquieting film about a teenager who gets lost in the maze of the never-ending reproductions of his Dorian Grayesque portrait. Taking to new and yet unexplored extremes, the fixation with the digital screens in their many guises, the film works like an almost endless fall – without any kind of parachute – through the network of images hidden behind and inside other images.

A. is obsessed with his image. Like a post-modern Narcissus, he projects himself in the endless choices that social media devices offer him. Riccardo Giacconi creates a disquieting film about a teenager who gets lost in the maze of the never-ending reproductions of his Dorian Grayesque portrait. Taking to new and yet unexplored extremes, the fixation with the digital screens in their many guises, the film works like an almost endless fall – without any kind of parachute – through the network of images hidden behind and inside other images.

Milano 2, a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of Milan. Built between 1970 and 1979 as a utopic city, it was Silvio Berlusconi’s first ambitious urban project. An area that today, at first glance could look like an anonymous suburb was once the laboratory for the imposition of a new lifestyle, which in the decades of “Berlusconism” spread at a national level and radically transformed the Italian culture.

A primal scream; is it that of the blue men, that of a monstrous creature, or perhaps that of a changing territory? An hour away from Venice, in the province of Pordenone, lives the only Tuareg community in Italy. Although they are no longer nomadic, they maintain a singular relationship with their origins and the land, passed down and preserved through stories and music in the course of journeys and many movements.

“In quantum physics, if two particles interact in a certain way and then become separated, regardless of how distant they are from each other they will share a state known as ‘quantum entanglement.’ That is, they will keep sharing information despite their separation. This theory used to upset Einstein. In his theory of relativity, no transmission of information could occur faster than the speed of light, therefore he couldn’t understand how the two particles could be simultaneously connected.”—Riccardo Giacconi

In 1990 poet Maria Luisa Spaziani (Turin, 1922 - Rome, 2014) published one of her more experimental works, the poem in heroic verse "Giovanna d’Arco" (Joan of Arc). One of the distinctive elements of the book is the invention of a language: Joan speaks with an angel, who addresses her in a non-existent language. The angel who embodies such voice is, for Spaziani, poetry itself, that is, that force that constantly presses the boundaries of language and the speakable, deforming such boundaries, revealing glimmers of unexplored areas of pure voice. The film features images of sea landscapes and a series of audio recordings of fire, two elements that constantly recur in the path Spaziani traces along the trajectory of her enunciation.

Six Italian partisans from the Second World War read extracts from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Series” of science fiction books. Italian translations of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy “Foundation Series” came 
out in 1963 and 1964. In the same years, Italian literature entered an important phase for the Resistance Novel, a genre whose narrative takes place in the partisan groups during Second World War’s Italian Resistance – for example, Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata, defined by Italo Calvino as “the novel of Italian Resistance”. Una questione privata was published in 1963, exactly the same year when Italian translations of Asimov’s Foundation Series started to come out. In each of the external locations portrayed in the film, an episode connected with Resistance in central Italy took place. The soundtrack of the film comprises extracts from 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, of which Isaac Asimov was subsequently asked to write a literary version.

Extending the artist’s research into the complex genealogy of South Tyrol, a province that’s home to Italy’s German-speaking population, Riccardo Giacconi’s film offers a minute, zoomed-in examination of historical photographs, uncovering the markers of an insidious ideological undercurrent—sometimes oblique, sometimes overt—sustained through neo-fascist symbolism, rituals, and terrorist activity into the present.