Now in its sixth edition, Videocittà, the festival which explores the most advanced forms of audiovisual and digital languages in the national and international cultural context, returns from 13 to 16 July. After last year’s success, which registered over 15,000 thousand admissions, the festival will once again find its beating heart in the largest area of industrial archaeology in Europe: the Gazometro in Rome.
In continuity with the previous edition, this year’s theme will again be Transition, understood as a participatory process, shared and based on pragmatic and concrete choices, making the festival also a vehicle for ethical and civic values.
Kicking off this year’s edition will be the spectacular and monumental site-specific work Mater Terrae by the international art studio Sila Sveta – one of the leading producers of cutting-edge multimedia shows, including the closing ceremony of the Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 – which will invest the largest metal cylinder of the Gazometro with a visionary vortex of video projections in close dialogue with the original music of one of the most innovative protagonists of the Italian music scene, the producer and composer Mace. The installation is produced by Eni, curated by Videocittà, with executive production by Eventi Italiani.
A further site-specific creation will enhance the second architectural structure in the Gazometro area: the Blast Furnace will in fact be the subject of an intervention curated by None Collective with a series of video contents on the theme of Transition, which will act as an intangible backdrop to the Live and DJ sets of some of the most interesting exponents of the new national and international audiovisual scene, from the French electronic music duo The Blaze, involved thanks to the support of the Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati, to the house music and digital arts pioneer Dixon, to the avant-pop of the American transplanted in Berlin Lyra Pramuk, passing through the Italians Bawrut, Ginevra Nervi, Bnkr44, Ginevra and Elasi.
The Blast Furnace will also host Futura, a collective exhibition that brings together the most representative national and international artists from the panorama of contemporary digital art and motion graphics: through kinetic typography works, each selected artist will compose a message expressing the theme of this edition. Futura thus aims to be a collection of voices from the present to leave a trace in the future. Among the artists involved: the Englishwoman Tina Touli, considered among the 15 best young designers in the world, the computational designer Vera van de Seyp, the Chinese illustrator and animator Zipeng Zhu but also Federico Leggio, Studio Mistaker and Gianluca Italiano .
Still in the Gazometro area, Opificio 41 will host a programme of audio-video Live Performances including the one by Nivva – realised in collaboration with the Czech Centre – in which a digital avatar confronts the spectator with the omnipresence of algorithms in our lives to reflect on the future scenarios of AI; that of Bromo – in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain in Italy – a digital art project that uses film codes; and, finally, that of Piove, a producer and singer with a secret identity who, between futuristic aesthetics, 3D art, glitche and hyperpop, investigates the horizons of the Transhuman.
Once again this year, the festival reserves a large space for Videoart with a dedicated three-evening event curated by Damiana Leoni and Rä di Martino.
The protagonist of the first evening will be the Greek artist Janis Rafa (1984) who brings to Videocittà 2023 her most representative works of the last 10 years, including Lacerate, presented during the last Venice Art Biennale. This will be followed at the end of the screening by a talk with the artist and Leonardo Bigazzi, curator and producer of artists’ films and since 2020 curator of the In Between Art Film Foundation.
The second evening will feature a review of video works from the MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo video art collection. A collection with works by international authors, especially Italians, covering a time span from the 1970s to the present, representing the great variety of expressive forms and contents that characterise artists working with the moving image. With this evening, after the first two editions of the festival, the collaboration between Videocittà and MAXXI is strengthened and resumed, with another intervention at the museum’s Videogallery in the autumn of 2023.
At the centre of the last evening will be the latest chapter of Black Med, an ongoing project by Invernomuto. Invernomuto is the name of the artistic personality generated in 2003 by Simone Bertuzzi (1983) and Simone Trabucchi (1982). Black Med, a project started in development since 2018 has produced diverse outputs in the visual and sound arts, for Videocittà will be a live performance, music and video, exploring through musical culture the notion of the black Mediterranean, reconstructing the labyrinthine map of rhythms, sonorities and aesthetics that cross the Mediterranean.
Throughout the festival programme, a central role is reserved for moments of cultural in-depth analysis through a series of Talks on the major themes of current communication. In the context of the relationship between new media and digital creators, The Jackal and Onemore Pictures will present the project The Jackal Meta show, a live show that combines the most modern technologies applied to audiovisuals and the metaverse, streamed as an absolute premiere on 14 July: on the Videocittà stage Aurora Leone and Gianluca Fru will tell the audience about the development of the project, exclusively unveiling some of the show’s details. The relationship between information and new media will instead be the focus of three meetings with experts in the field led by journalist Alessandro Luna, while contemporary art scholar applied to the media Nicolas Ballario will be the master of ceremonies of a series of meetings on the theme of Entertainment and Video. Radio presenter, blogger and author Daniela Collu will instead take charge of a number of meetings with the artists scheduled at the festival. Also within the rich schedule of talks, the ADCI (Art Directors Club Italiano) will accompany the audience in the exploration of the new frontiers of advertising languages: in particular, Fashion Communication will be discussed with Paola Cantella (Creative Strategy Director of Cosmic), Music and Video with Francesco Taddeucci (Creative Director of Superhumans), and Artificial Intelligence with Massimiliano Maria Longo (digital innovator, #CancerHacker and Creative Director). To complete the panel of talks, Andrea Schiavoni of Veracura, a social and environmental impact accelerator, and Martina Rogato of Human Rights International Corner will delve into the new modes of digital consumption and the consequent impact on the environment.
One of the highlights of this edition of Videocittà is certainly Shapes and colours of a discovery, the videomapping realised by Luca Agnani Studio and curated by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, which took place in 2012 at CERN in Geneva and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. One of the buildings in the Gazometer complex will take on the colours and appearance of the instruments built to realise this scientific feat: from the most powerful particle accelerator in the world to detectors as big as cathedrals, based on extremely advanced technologies.
Also of fundamental importance is the schedule of Agorà, Videocittà’s professional programme designed to internationalise and strengthen the Italian contemporary audiovisual creative industry on foreign markets. Digital Culture, Motion graphics, Artificial Intelligence and Metaverse will be discussed, as well as Festivals and Live Entertainment, involving some of the most relevant national and international professionals and cultural institutions, including Silvio Salvo of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Antonia Folguera curator of Sonar+D (Spain in collaboration with the Spanish Embassy, Martin Posta founder of Signal Festival (Czech Republic), Arianna Esposito curator of MIRA Festival (Spain); the Agorà programme also includes a series of masterclasses devoted to Cinema 3. 0, organised in collaboration with Anica Academy, MIA|Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo and Anica’s Union of Publishers and Digital Creators. We will also talk about services and facilities for professionals in our sector and we will do so thanks to the collaboration with Rete DOC. The great novelty of this edition is instead Agorà EXPO: for the first time, professionals and companies in the creative sector will show their projects and products in a new exhibition area set up on the ground floor of the Gazometro G3, to share their contents and experiences with the public as well. The works on display in this area include a series of Virtual Reality short films produced by Rai Cinema, the creations of leading national and international companies and Italian creative academies, as well as Still Life, a virtual reality work by Chiara Passa, curated by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale in collaboration with Meta.
Videocittà 2023 also supports two projects outside the festival. The first is Sinfonie Urbane a Torbellamonaca, an innovative format representing the first example of docu-mapping, realised in the places and with the people of Tor Bella Monaca, the neighbourhood where it will be screened.
The second is Extravillae. Metamorphosis in Beauty, a new cinematographic event scheduled in the splendid setting of Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este in Tivoli dedicated to the theme of beauty, which will host the performance Transient by Studio Quayola in a special evening connecting the two Festivals: the closing of Videocittà 2023 and the opening of the event directed by Remigio Truocchio.
Finally, Videocittà Awards, the prize dedicated to the new frontiers of audiovisuals. Presented by journalist Sonia Serafini, they will be awarded to the most innovative realities and talented professionals in the sector, represented in 5 categories: Digital Avant-garde, Next, Art and Technology, Music Video and Communication – ADCI Award. Previous award winners include: Zerocalcare, Valerio Lundini, Karol Sudolsky, Lorenza Liguori, Momoka Banana, Giusy Amoroso, Borotalco Tv, Francesco Lancia and Francesco De Carlo, Canale di Venti, Quayola, Ombra Design and many other creative talents among the most appreciated in recent years.
(from the press release)
VIDEOCITTÀ, Gazometro, Rome, 13 – 16.07.2023.
Visit here the website for the updated calendar of events
images: (cover 1) Bromo, VIDEOCITTÀ 2023 (2) Silva Sveta, Videocittà 2023 (3) NONE (4) Piove (5) RAFA, Jani Lacerate (6) Inverno muto (7) Forme e colori di una scoperta, INFN (8) Chiara Passa, Still Life (9) Ginevra Nervi
