Ultranarrazioni della città. Lo strano caso di Voltepulciano (Ultra-narrations of the city. The strange case of Voltepulciano) is a journey through history and the genres of image in motion to explore the urban root: the way it evolved through filmed image, its influence on popular culture and the resulting structural alteration that ensued in real life. So, the protagonist is the city and how it takes shape in collective perception through «technical reproduction», with particular emphasis on what cinema and some television phenomena have provided. New and unexpected elements materialize in narrative fiction and become impressed upon physical reality. Cinema is the medium that adapts itself best to the urban context «for linguistic reasons and perhaps for a structural affinity with the basic principles that regulate the processes on the screen and in the streets» (Caliandro). This and much more in an essay that alternates between film critiques, literature and philosophy. The «ultra-narrations of the city» are analyzed in a transversal and interdisciplinary manner in a story that traces historic roots and stops occasionally to take a more in-depth look at specific cases: film and television productions which, more than any other form, have modified the borrowed setting in an effect created by a reciprocal fusion between imagination and reality.
«Critical Grounds», the Arshake’s publishing project, curated by Christian Caliandro and Antonello Tolve, is born from the desire to network precious and of great cultural interest books in open source electronic format. It is, in fact, a shelf which, together with the re-release of untraceable or forgotten essays, spreads rumors of the international critical scene to offer a wide-ranging look at the culturological contemporary landscape. Alongside this program, «Critical Grounds» also proposes artist books, new authors and new voices of fiction to share with its authors and its readers a wide choice of assumptions, guidelines, designs on the creative area of the near future. By orchestrating the critical tale with an archive of un-parallel images, Critical grounds #1, Esposizione dell’esposizione/ Exhibition of an Exhibition, by Antonello Tolve, investigated how and when exhibitions have conquered a key role in the attention of the critique as well as of the media, so to enter itself inside the exhibition frame.
