video feature
Rome
Arcipelago Film Festival
MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Arte Video Roma
Rome
For most travellers, Rome is representing a dream destination, also for Wilfried. He was visiting Rome for the 1st time in 1980, when he was – after his art studies in Amsterdam – on the classical tour through Italy, like uncountable artists generations did before. Then it took 15 years, until Wilfried was landing by chance in Rome, when he was in February /March 1995 in Poland in an art residency in Katowice during an extremely cold winter. When he was vising the beautiful Renaissance town of Zamosc, and frozen to ice strolling through the empty streets of the old city center, he saw the poster of a travel agency promoting a pilgrimage travel to Rome – yes, Wilfried liked the idea to be in the warmth of the South, and spending Easter in Rome what a great idea, he entered the agency and booked spontaneously a travel to Rome which was supposed to start already the next day, and without reflecting too long, he was sitting in the pilgrimage bus collecting other pilgrims on the way to Rome in the montainside of Southern Poland, and then after an overnight ride next morning when he opened his eyes after the uncomfortable sleeping it was a kind of cultural shock, the bus stopped on the auto-route close to Bologna and Wilfried ordered a cup of cappucino in the restaurant, real Italian capuccino!! it felt like in heaven, and so it was when the bus was entering Rome and stopped close to the Termini station – and suddenly Wilfried was overwhelmed by the warmth and the lucky spirit of classical Rome!!
When he is visiting the next time Rome, it is 10 years further ahead in 2005, this time he is in a professional mission here, because he is participating in the shortfilm festival “Arcipelago”, using his visit to Pescaca some days ago, to attend the festival in Rome. And it is the same lucky feeling like the times before, it is the spirit of history, whereever he is looking around he is confronted with artefacts he was admiring already when he was at school (he studied Latin and ancient Greek), and being confronted with the fundament of the European culture and civilization, it gives him a feeling of eternity! The reality of the film festival however is taking Wilfried back to earth, because he is searching in the whole city center of Rome for the festival location, he is asking the local people nobody knows, and close to the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, when he is following a small street, he is passing a door and by walking some steps back, he suddenly recognizes the poster of the festival and the closed door of glass is representing the entrance to the cinema where the festival is taking place, bad luck! After a warm welcome as one of the participating film directors, Wilfried is looking for the screening room presenting the program including his film – and while he is looking and looking he recognizes films and videos he has in his own VideoChannel programs, but he is shocked about the quality of the screened films and he nearly missed his own film because he could not recognize it as his own film due to the horrible quality. One has to imagine, Wilfried has provided especially a Betacam video copy, this was the best screening quality at that time, but what was the festival making out of the wonderful films and videos?!?! Wilfried was tremendously shocked and complaines the desastrous film quality, but the festival director is just shrugging his shoulders. Ok, Wilfried is thinking, it is probaly no good idea to attend a festival, at all, especially like in the given case when he had to pay his stay in Rome by himself. – But, of course, Wilfried was also visiting some festivals whose staff was really caring about the guests and the best screening quality for the audience! – Wilfried is tremendously agry, because the audience watching these bad quality films is thinking the bad quality would be intentional!
2005
Santa Maria in Trastevere
2005
13 TH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF SHORT FILMS AND NEW IMAGES Arcipelago
17-23 June 2005
Founded in 1992, ARCIPELAGO – International Festival of Short Films and New Images is a project “in progress” with the aim of worldwide search and acknowledgement of the most original drives and of the most innovative film languages developing inside non-standard audiovisual formats – starting with short films and including products belonging to the new “digital domain” and to the Web’s borderless immaterial landscapes. .
Special attention is paid to the European production, witnessing its quakes and registering its changes, inquiring on the creative and productive diversities, as well as drawing the most updated map of new trends and of independent, marginal and experimental activities
he video tells the story of the human desire to be as close to truth as possible. But who ever will succeed while living a life dominated by the fast running time and endless searching?
If there is any paradise, then monks or people really resting within themselves find a paradise close to truth close to GOD. But it is only truth people are believing in. Is there absolute truth?
The video consists of three sections, a spiritual and a physical section and the acting level, the artist who is filming the scene, an intruder who become witness of a ritual of truth.
This basic video was filmed in 2003 at the Rila Monastery, the spiritual centre of Bulgaria.
2006
MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts
It is actually nearly the same time, when Wilfried is contacted by Elena Giulia Rossi, a curator at a Rome based museum. He never had heard before of MAXXI – The National Museum for the 21st century arts, but he likes the idea that one of his interactive work ]and[-scape should be part of an exhibition to take place in 2006 – Netspace The geographies of spaces @ MAXXI .
MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, is the first Italian national institution devoted to contemporary creativity.
Conceived as a broad cultural campus, MAXXI is managed by a Foundation constituted in the July of 2009 by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and headed by Giovanna Melandri
Since December 2013 Hou Hanru has been the Artistic Director of the museum, which includes MAXXI Architettura, directed by Margherita Guccione, and MAXXI Arte, directed by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.
The programming of the activities – exhibitions, workshops, conferences, shows, projections, educational projects – reflects MAXXI’s vocation as a place for the conservation and exhibition of its collections but also, and above all, a laboratory for cultural experimentation and innovation, for the study, research and production of the aesthetic contents of our time.
The MAXXI building is a major architectural work designed by Zaha Hadid, located in Rome’s Flaminio quarter and featuring innovative and spectacular forms.
Netspace – Geographies of Spaces curated by Elena Julia Rossi
2011
C.A.R.M.A. Roma
In 2011, there is another reason to go to Rome, this time Wilfried is invited to prepare as a curator of Cologne International Video Art Festival a guest screening program for “Arte Video Roma”, a videoart festival realised by the Rome based organisation C.A.R.M.A. However, he will not attend the festival, because the schedule of his activities this year is so tight, that he can hardly manage the more than 30 venues.
CologneOFF 2011 Rome
is a collaboration with
C..A..R..M..A. Centro d’Arti e Ricerche Multimediali Applicate &
Arte Video Roma Festival 2011
21 – 23 October 2011
The invited screening program is entitled:
Art & The City: Mirrors
This selection includes videos from the 7th CologneOFF festival edition to be launched in September 2011. “Art & the City” – is the title of a series of selections dealing with the urban context and how artists reflect and experience it – as a machine producing continuously memory, as a mysterious, frightening, absurd, creative or hopeless environment – once initiated now endlessly looping like a perpetuum mobile.
2. Marko Batista (Slovenia) – The Machine of Memory, 2008, 1:29
3. Matthias Härenstam (Sweden) – Closed Circuit, 2011, 3:01
4. Shahar Marcus (Israel) – Leap of Faith, 2010, 3:02
5. Johanna Reich (Germany) – A State of Crystal, 2010, 3’19
6. Sarah Mock (Germany) – Is there a way out, 2011, 3 :47
7. Albert Merino Gomez (Spain) – The City and The Other, 2010, 3:09
8. Francesca Fini (Italy) – Oasis in The Desert, 2010, 5:05
9. Yuriy Kruchak, Yulia Kostereva (Ukraine) – The 7th of November, 2009, 3:36
10. Ana Brotas (Portugal) – Okupa, 2009, 2:14
11. Ezra Wube (Ethiopia) – Amora, 2011, 2:26
12. Liu Wei (China) – Hopeless Land, 2009,
13. Andrew Fedak (USA) – Orange County Surreality, 2011, 3:00
14. My Name is Scot (Canada) – Independance, 2011, 7:57
15. Tim Stokes (UK) – Untitled, 2011, 2:00
AUDIOVISIONI DIGITALI –
International exhibition of audiovisual research
“Audiovisioni digitali ” is a nomadic exhibition created and realized by Le Momo Electronique , the scientific team of C.A.R.M.A (a cultural association born in Rome 2008). The Group, made up of critics, theorists, and artists is portrayed by a specific research (historical, critical and philosophical), and is mostly based on certain tendencies of present digital videoart.
“ From a Linguistic, formal and conceptual point of view, the artistic experimentation of present editing software and motion graphics is at the centre of our interest”. (Lino Strangis, intermedial artist, theorist and director of C.A.R.M.A)
Arash Radpour, La creazione (L’eternità), 2012, 4’27”
Danilo Torre, Submission, 2010, 4’59”
Igor Imhoff, Small white dots, 2011
Igor Imhoff, Percorso#0008-0209, 2009, 4’35” (3)
Mattias Harenstam, Closed circuit (In the middle of Sweden)
Piero Chiariello, Camminare su una spiaggia abruzzese
Guglielmo Emmolo, Rapid Mind Movement, 2010, 3’32”
Lino Strangis, A new big bang for a new home
