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Home Special Project

Special Project # 4. I Cieli di Roma. Mariagrazia Pontorno

Christian Caliandro by Christian Caliandro
26/04/2018
in Special Project
Arshake is pleased to present Mariagrazia Pontorno’s I Cieli di Roma. Work in Progress, Special Project #4, accompanied by a critique by Christian Caliandro. This time the banner becomes a window to the artist’s studio or, in other words, it looks directly upon the creative process that will result in I Cieli di Roma (The Skies of Rome), a 3-D work inspired by the Pope’s helicopter ride away from Rome the day he resigned. That flight has become a symbol of our times. Pontorno intends to reinterpret it through a technological filter which – as in all of her works – reallocates it between fiction and reality. The banner gives us a glimpse of and leads us to a space in which the artist shares her reflections, thoughts and images of this work in progress. (Arshake)

The flight of Benedict XVI, right after his resignation, has immediately penetrated the collective imaginary as a kind of classic. The white helicopter flying over Rome has now become a sacred vehicle in and of itself, reconfigured for the occasion and used as the mobile pivot of a tradition invented specifically for an original and unprecedented event.

[youtube id=”WMnZag2G4Q0″ width=”620″ height=”360″]

The scene does have a precise premise and even the filming style anticipates it: the opening scene of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960).In the scene, a helicopter is transporting a statue of Jesus; it arrives over the Eternal City, flying above the working-class suburbs where people wave to it from the rooftops of their homes and – in the case of the scene with the bricklayers – from the streets (exactly the way the faithful believers would act 53 years later with their resigning pope). This is a vision that superimposes the two levels of a tradition that is thousands of years old and modernity: with Marcello Rubini, the alter ego of Fellini himself, who – in his very first appearance on film – asks for the phone number of one of the bikini-clad girls taking a sunbath on a rooftop. The movements from 1960 and 2013 are opposite and symmetrical: in Fellini’s world, the statue of Jesus and the helicopter are heading to Saint Peter and the Vatican («But where are you taking him?». «To the Pope!»); in the second trip, the helicopter is transporting the Pope from the Vatican to an outer area of the city and away from his function.

[youtube id=”uo84caBoToQ” width=”620″ height=”360″]

Mariagrazia Pontorno has isolated and eroded the elements of this journey. The white helicopter becomes an object that is even more metaphysical than the original, an authentic means of spiritual transportation that draws aerial lines over the city’s zones. Rome is not only a physical place but (above all) a psychic and cultural one. In this work, the helicopter and the city undergo two operations of a divergent sign which do not cancel one another out but strengthen one another instead: on the one hand, the dematerializing strength of the digital sign; on the other hand, the viewpoint of the unmanned aerial vehicle that hooks our glance to the city’s landscape and representational places. What we are looking at becomes a carrier, a presence in motion that gives us a glimpse of the fertile nature of the present moment – hooked onto the future as well as onto the past.

What emerges is a panorama that is usually obliterated from common experience and ordinary perception: that of art, in which some of the major institutions are encountering a stage of extreme weakness and fragility. Alongside this system we see another, generally invisible, Rome that is yet woven with reminders and references: suburban Rome of the former outskirts, once so typical to Pasolini and to Rossellini before him. That Rome which no longer has its cultural voice as it waits to be narrated and imagined again – described by Walter Siti as the “Italy which Pasolini sung of in his poem Gramsci’s Ashes only devitalized and deprived of its identity. Between one bordello and another, the Tiburtina district at night with its disembowelment, its demented and corrupt building industry, the shattered glass of shops which had gone adrift and factories no longer in use” (Roma Las Vegas, «la Repubblica», 31 March 2013).


Mariagrazia Pontorno (Catania, 1978) teaches «Digital Application for Visual Art» at the Academy of Art in Catanzaro. In the latest years her research has been focusing on 3D animation, so to recreate images that recall day-to-day life and the passing of time. 3D has been enabling her to evoke visual paradoxes: what looks familiar, sure and known it suddently appears distant, extraneous and perturbant. Thanks to the employment of video-animation softwares, the artist reconstructs scenes where the border between fiction and reality is evanescent and ephemeral. The artificial doubles, once confronted with the analogic dimension, generate a visual short circuit. Her work has been featured in private as well as instutional venues, in Italy and abroad. Among them: Biedermann Museum (Donaueschingen, Germany); Castel S.Elmo Museum (Naples, Italy); ISP- Independent Study Program (New York); HSF (New York); Muratcentoventidue Gallery (Bari, Italy); MLAC – Museo Laboratorio di Roma at the University «La Sapienza» (Rome); MACRO Museum (Rome); Lithium Project (Naples, Italy);  Monitor Gallery (Rome); RISO Museum (Palermo, Italy); Stadtgalerie (Kiel, Germany); Thessaloniki Art Center (Thessaloniki, Greece).
Christian Caliandro (1979) is a contemporary art historian, researcher for Cultural Studies and expert of cultural politics. He is member of the scientific committee of Symbola Foundation for the Italian Qualities. He is the scientific Director of the Cultural Project: Un Paese. Raccontare il presente italiano/A country. Talking about the Italian Present. In 2006 he was awarded for the first edition of Premio MAXXI for the Italian critic. He is author of La trasformazione delle immagini. L’inizio del postmoderno tra arte, cinema e teoria, 1977-83 (Mondadori, Electa 2008), Italia Reloaded. Ripartire con la cultura (Il Mulino / 2011, with Pier Luigi Sacco) and Italia Revolution. Rinascere con la cultura (Bompiani / 2013). For the art newspaper «Exibart» he curated the columns inteoria and essai; since 2011 he has been curating for «Artribune» the columns Inpratica and Cinema. He regularly collaborates with minima&moralia, alfabeta2, doppio zero. He has curated a number of solo exhibitions (among them the ones of the artists Bevilacqua, Pesce Khete, Ward Shelley, Nina Surel, Antonio De Pascale) as well as group shows, among which The Idea of Realism // L’idea del realismo (2013, with Carl D’Alvia), and Concrete Ghost // Fantasma concreto, both belonging to the project Cinque Mostre/Five Shows at the American Academy in Rome.
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