Francesco Jodice. Rivoluzioni.

The exhibition consists of a twenty-five-minute film obtained from the artist’s advance in the use of archival footage. The video narration is strongly placed in dialogue with the presence on the wall of a statement linked to a historical event which presumably took place in 1989, that is the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also of the release of Francis’s theory of the end of history. Fukuyama; in addition to the impactful presence of a wall teeming with images of subjects who are exhibited for an absent public and which can be interpreted as a crowd, a community, but also as many autonomous individuals who live exclusively in “direct”. The video presented by Jodice is placed halfway between a docufiction and an experimental film using pre-existing video materials, but also between the video installation or the conceptual work with a thesis.

The images that alternate range from those of galaxies distant from ours to those of characters from 1930s films involved in a melancholy questioning about their destiny, to those of exhibitionism of various subjects of 1980s films that seem committed to witnessing the their existence first of all to themselves. Jodice’s intent in associating these images produced at the time of analogue mediums is not to criticize and implode from the inside the society of entertainment 2.0 of the current digitized globalization. Rather, it is the attempt to create a suspension of judgment with which we can analyze why we have reached an absence of expectation for the future just after the human being seems to have conquered the means to share and make all possible knowledge democratic. The artist in explaining the destabilizing narrative system of the space probe launched in 1989 to propose the video as an objective document adds that: “it was necessary to suggest that History is in a stalemate, if not finished, and that all that happens to us is a loop, a replica of passages from lives already lived between fiction and reality. The trilogy of films dedicated to the American Century, started with Atlante (2015) and continued with the video installation American Recordings (2015), ends with this video of 2019 ”. The author also specifies that “the filmic narrative takes my obsession with editing archive videos to its extreme consequences even if it presents itself as the improbable original video sent by a probe, Kaiju 2, which had the aim of” seeing ”And film what was beyond the edge of a black hole. But the images that “reach us” and which should represent the other side of the known universe are nothing more than a reflection of ourselves and our cultural conventions. ”

Francesco Jodice has always used photography and video editing to investigate the changes in the contemporary social landscape, with particular attention to the phenomena of urban anthropology and the production of new participation processes. Attitude that led him to be one of the founders of the Multiplicity and Zapruder collectives as well as teaching at the Naba in Milan. Among his main projects are the photographic atlas What We Want, an observatory on landscape modifications as a projection of collective desires, the urban stalking archive The Secret Traces, while the trilogy on the American century explores the possible future scenarios of ‘West.