PAC

Among the most original voices working at the crossroads of cinema and art in Italy, Yuri Ancarani is the creator of an imaginative geography of fragments that investigate regions generally unseen, realities that the artist enters in the first person. His productions do not follow a specific script, but his films are rather expressions of intuitions that determine the very acts of filming and montage. In approaching aspects linked to the dynamics of work, the traumas of modern society and the failure of capitalism, Ancarani draws on a broad vocabulary of references ranging from the cinema of master directors, like Antonioni and Iñárritu, to the fiction of Japanese cyberpunk of the 1980s. The literature of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, the landscape photographs of Luigi Ghirri, and the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, his birthplace, are all part of the artist’s archipelago of influences.
Lascia stare i sogni (Forget Your Dreams), the title of the exhibition that brings together over twenty years of Yuri Ancarani’s production, is a quotation from the artist’s latest film Atlantide (Atlantis), and is an invitation to the viewer to be guided through the hidden revelations of reality.

Seduction, entertainment, disorientation are only some of the modalities taken up by Ancarani to resonate with the exhibition space, and, through visual leitmotivs of materials and forms, he creates pictorial choreography that acts upon the visitor, amplifying his sensory perception.
Ancarani uses the viewer’s body and his relationship to technology as the instruments for the mutual redefining of film and the visual arts, which is made concrete in his works in an almost sculptural expression of the moving image, emancipating film from the classical cinematic tradition.

Making his way through a red curtain, the viewer finds himself faced with a section of the floor covered in a blue carpet that introduces the presence of a screen where is projected Da Vinci (2012), the last chapter of La malattia del ferro. ■ The first image of the work is that of a pulsating organism, veined by capillaries inside membranes penetrated by metallic clips and probes. The colours turn toward cold blue tones, and the framing is slightly unstable. It is not clear whether this is a science fiction film or a hyperreal experience. What is actually shown is the filming of an operation performed with a sophisticated surgical system called ‘da Vinci Si’. The mini-invasive robotic technology offers an enlarged view of the area, in which the surgeon manipulates the tools from an external console, avoiding any direct contact with the patient’s body. The sound increases the sense of waiting and dread that accompanies the event. ■ Yuri Ancarani’s documentary approach continues in his exploration of the existential relationship between man and technology. In Da Vinci, the surgeon and the surgical instrument are portrayed as a single synergistic entity. By re-examining the relationships that opposed human beings to machines in the early modern period, Ancarani’s work can also be seen as being related to some performance art practices in the 1970s, which blurred the limits between the body and electronic equipment. ■ In Da Vinci, also presented at the 55th Venice Art Biennale, one observes a highly balanced ‘mechanical dance’, and, as in the other two films of the trilogy (Il Capo and Piattaforma Luna), the focus is on the rigour of the choreographed gestures that characterise the production process of specialised works. ■

Piattaforma Luna (2011) shows the inside of a hyperbaric chamber in which a group of six scuba divers specialised in working at great depths perform an off-shore operation on the platform Luna. For weeks, the divers’ existence unfolds in this space and under the sea, at a depth of 100 metres. Unlike Il Capo, set in a marble quarry, the scenes show an entirely unnatural place composed of a series of transitable passages and watertight openings that recall sci-fi imaginary. In the video, every movement is linked to the specificity of the environment, in which even the most ordinary everyday actions are questioned, defining a ‘new normality’. ■ The filming made with a fixed camera reinforces the general atmosphere of suspension, while the insistence on the centrality of the shooting heightens the intensity of the surveillance that the individuals are subjected to during the entire period. In the video, the dialogue is heard as a series of commands coming from a room outside the structure that guide the movements of the divers’ operations. Their replies, however, are distorted by the presence of helium in the hyperbaric chamber. Also in this work, language is employed as vehicle for movement: it produces unpredictable causes and effects and functions in relation to the claustrophobic environment, materializing the presence of the gas that is otherwise imperceptible to the viewer. Once out of the cabin, the image becomes increasingly abstract, and the dark shots of the deep sea —accompanied by the audio track by the Australian musician Ben Frost — reconnect the narration to the meditative tone with which the film opens. ■

In room 4, Yuri Ancarani presents his second trilogy, Le radici della violenza (The Roots of Violence) (2014-ongoing), and even before one enters the room where the films San Siro (2014) and San Vittore (2018) are alternatingly projected on two different screens, one can watch San Giorgio (ongoing) transmitted on a monitor, the last episode of the series. The three films’ titles evoke cristian tradition and at the same time emblematic contemporary spaces: the stadium, the prison, the bank, in this case San Giorgio Bank, dating XVII Century. ■ The shots, filmed in a clearly manneristic fashion, are characterised by cold, unpleasant tones in clear contrast to the gleam of the gold ingots in the safes. Going through the sequences, one discovers what is hidden behind the meticulous security measures: the destruction of the paper records of the transactions that determine the value of the precious metal. Unlike the images, the sound track diffuses a sense of discovery and revelation that contrasts with the concealment presented in theimages. ■ San Giorgio is a work in progress, and even if its status is still ongoing, Ancarani decided to exhibit it along with his other productions, giving a sense of indeterminacy to the exhibition narrative. In 2019, for his solo show at the Castello di Rivoli, the video was projected without sound on a plasma screen, and, as a sort of extension of the two-dimensionality of the pictorial surface, the images flowed by in an occasionally sinister scenario. ■ Like an abandoned body in the greyness of the city of Milan, San Siro (2014) narrates the moments preceding the start of a match in the homonymous stadium. Manholes, electric cables, padlocks, and bleachers form the skeleton of the football arena, whose “stomach” is dotted with grids of luminous panels that facilitate maintaining the grass on the field. Although Ancarani describes the routine procedures for supervising the operations and preparing the court, in the images he uses sound – punctuated by the explosion of firecrackers to scare away the pigeons from the grass – to imprint the echo of the empty space that, with the start of the match, will soon be filled with the energy of players and fans. ■ The stadium is portrayed as an architectural apparatus, made of ramps similar to electric wires and cement blocks that recall circuit boards, while the sounds of the city enter, bouncing off the bodies of the fans, awaiting the noise of the match. An iconic site, the structure has been the subject of various films, among which are the ironic Video – Stadio, 1997, by Paola di Bello, and San Siro, 2000, by Grazia Toderi, focussing on the relationship between television and the media. Presented for the first time as part of an exhibition in occasion of the MAXXI award in Rome, Yuri Ancarani’s video is an eloquent image of society. ■ Part of the Le radici della violenza trilogy, the work once again reveals the centrality of concepts connected to forms of communication. ■ Exhibited as a interdependent to San Siro, San Vittore (2018) follows Ancarani’s exploration of the staging of violence and trauma in everyday life, investigating childrens’ experience in prisons. With clinical attention, the artist lingers on the description of the security measures to which minors are subjected when visiting their parents inside San Vittore. Once again, Ancarani focusses on a specific moment in the prison procedures to refer to its overall structure. Without the use of pre-established rhetorical narratives, the prison is described through some of its elements of containing: the walls, the barred windows, and the metal detector. ■ The individuals who appear in the scenes are both faceless and voiceless, as the dialogue is replaced by the children’s drawings depicting the prison. Created during workshops conducted by the group Bambinisenzasbarre (Children without Bars)—which works in the prison to safeguard family relationships—the representations reflect the childlike imagination that transforms the prison into an enchanted castle with princes and monsters. Ancarani decides to entrust the children’s drawings with the narration of San Vittore, in a dialogue of mutual impressions between illustration and frame. ■ The simplicity of Ancarani’s visual approach, made by detailed and still frames linked to a distinctive sound design by his long-time collaborator Mirco Mencacci, gives the work a completely surprising impact. ■

The artist’s first video series – filmed between 2000 and 2009 – grouped together under the title Ricordi per moderni (2009), unfolds longitudinally on eight screens placed in front of the darkened glass windows of the exhibition space. In the background, fragments of everyday life appear in transparencies and connect to the filmed images producing a real-time editing that crate a dizzying, melancholic view of the city. ■ The project, Ricordi per moderni, ironically evokes a society that has left its traditions behind, exchanging them for an idea of progress that has already surrendered to desolation and to the exploitation of the environment. The work is inspired by the prose style of Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955–1991), in returning to the page what he called ‘the sound of spoken language’, an attempt to transmit the oral experience by rewriting it in strong, direct linguistic terms. ■ In this work, Ancarani is therefore the reporter and narrator of the circumstances that he encounters in disparate locations of the Riviera Romagnola: from industrial petrochemical zones to swamps, from the beaches of Rimini to family celebrations. Postcards of almost charming places, the videos narrate experiences that have a dreamlike and surreal characters, in which life passes with the emphasis on normality charged with contradictory impulses. In the various succeeding chapters, outskirts appear immersed in solitude, lagoons and inlets, along with streets and beaches crowded with languid presences. The Riviera Romagnola is portrayed as an incubator of destinies at the crossroads of atmospheres with ambiguous or rhetorical characteristics, each introduced by the title of one of the videos in the series exhibited here: Rimini (2009), Made in Italy (2009), In Dio Noi Crediamo (In God We Trust, 2008), Aranci Mantra (Mantra Orange, 2007), Baal (2007), Invito al Desiderio (Invitation to Desire, 2006), Parcheggi a pagamento (2005–2012), Fuori Stagione (Off Season, 2005–2012), Isole d’Acciaio (Islands of Steel) (2005), Lido Adriano (2004), Vicino al cuore (Close to the Heart, 2003), IP OP (HIP HOP, 2003), La questione romagnola (The Romagnola Question, 2002–2012). ■

Yuri Ancarani invests the spaces of the PAC’s passageway with an idea of time that is more stretched out than in the other exhibition rooms, transforming them into places for viewing two of his major feature-length films. Among Ancarani’s many productions, The Challenge (2016) stands out because of its strong cinematic qualities, recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in the opening titles; Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the black monolith becomes the contours of an LED screen in the desert; and even Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992), where the strangeness of the landscape is filmed from an alien point of view. ■ The images in The Challenge take us to the desert of Qatar during the preparations for a falconry competition that illustrate the excesses of Qatari society. The sequences reveal the forms of amusement of various communities of men who gravitate toward the cult of the motorcycle, car races, and falconry, including the surreal image of a man with a cheetah on a leash in a Lamborghini speeding through the desert. The film employs carefully composed sequences with the frequent use of shots based on the symmetry of the central axis of the frame, together with moments in which the image becomes fragmented, and the camera, fixed to the falcon’s head, records sharp, restless views. The sound track, on the other hand, composed by Lorenzo Senni and Francesco Fantini, opens with broader orchestral passages. ■ A place of mystery and memory, the desert appears in highly topical video productions that, like The Challenge, offer a rereading of the traumas and amnesias of everyday life. Among these are the iconic film Atomic Park (2003), by the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, filmed in the White Sands desert in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was tested, and the more recent Everything But the World (2021), by the artistic collective DIS, which traverses the evolutionary eras of mankind from the agricultural revolution to the Amazon, addressing the complexity of the worldwide existence of human beings. ■