How to enact a restraint @ PAV Parco Arte Vivente
Text by: Charlotte Garlaschelli
Censorship is making quite a comeback. A tool that has disfigured hundreds of films, prevented many more from even seeing the daylight and disciplined human costumes. Lately the issue of censorship has been stepping into the rooms of deputies and senators again. However, this time it is not haunting our cinema halls, but attempting to interfere with the web. An emblematic case was that of the documentary Porno e Libertà by Carmine Amoroso, presented at the 2016 Rotterdam Film Festival, but obscured by Facebook algorithms. The European Cyberbullying legislation tries to protect women from the so-called revenge porn, but in doing so it contains several disturbing features as far as freedom of expression is concerned.
Film censorship was born in Italy in 1913 and was especially active between the ’30s and the ‘70s. Nevertheless, it also contains some interesting ideas that multimedia artist Irene Dioniso has “collected” in order to present them to the public from March 23th to April 15th at PAV Parco Arte Vivente. Her videoinstallation is entitled PROIBITISSIMO! and is connected to the artist’s film Il mio unico crimine è vedere chiaro nella notte (My only crime is I can see clearly at night), the only artistic project to be presented during the Biennale of Moving images in Geneva. It basically consists of edited pieces of films, cut due to film censorship starting from the 1950’s until the last decade of the Twentieth century, a process that was required by the law n. 938 of December 20, 1949 to allow film distribution in Italy. The recovery resulted in a long work of research, achieved thanks to the Italian film archives and a large group of people, who analysed more than seventy films. The recovered material was then divided into themes: violence, religion, politics, sexuality.
In addition to the videoinstallation, there will be some related material such as storyboards, archive documents, working diaries; the exhibition engages its visitor in the long process of analysis that is part of the project itself, through a “making of” and operations of foundfootage and re-enacting. The meaning of “enacting” can be interpreted both as representation and executive measure: it captures a special reflection on how social customs change and how mechanisms of social discipline and repression work. A workshop related to the exhibition, Workshop_54/Proibitissimo, dal profondo, will apply the technique of psychodrama to re-enact what our emotional life has involuntarily censored and subsequently stored in our unconscious.
PROIBITISSIMO!
A project by Irene Dionisio
Curated by Viola Invernizzi
PAV Parco Arte Vivente in Turin
24 March – 15 April 2018
Opening Thursday, March 23th at 6 PM
