Trieste, January 21-28, 2010

The international video art festival CATODICA has reached its fifth edition this year: promoted by FUCINE MUTE, curated by Maria Campitelli, the festival will take place from January the 21st to the 28th in the framework of the Trieste Film Festival. Main site of the festival’s activities will be Stazione Rogers, (riva Grumula, 14), a new home for contemporary cultural happenings, once a well-known central gas station, now a well-established culture dispenser.
An additional spot where selected videos will run in loop will be a large screen placed inside the Miela Theatre, main site of the Trieste Film Festival (this year sadly confined in restricted spaces because of unavoidable budget cuts). CATODICA will run for a whole week in the new location, allowing its affectionate audience to fully enjoy the countless works included in the programme. But there’s more to it: CATODICA will also liven up another Alpe Adria Cinema spot (via Pescheria, 4), with a striking video installation and three video stations.

Artists and creative professionals all over the world are growingly interested in short image-in-movement performances, thanks to increasingly accessible digital technologies and the unique narrative conveyed by the medium itself, symbolically condensed in a very short time span and so consistent with modern expectations. The age long yearning for painting in movement, so persistently sought after at the beginning of the last century by cubists and futurists, has become a consolidated reality, through cinema first and foremost, and later on, thanks to the development of electronic technologies, through video art, with fifty years of history under the belt and constantly updating languages and technologies.
This year’s programme is extensive and varied: many artists will be presenting their work along the lines of a number of themes reflecting personal views on current affairs and on the paradoxes and uncertainties we all face up to these days.
All pervasive is a glance over the human body and its distinctive and collective expressions (as seen in the body-graphs shot by PierPaolo Koss in North Korea). Three are the more complex performances in this year’s schedule, each including a number of videos by the same artist, providing deeper insight of his work. This section, called Portraits, includes Mammut, by Macedonian artist Robert Gligorov, who has now been working in Italy for years, consisting of 10 videos portraying with powerful imagination the artist’s view of the world and current society; the work of PierPaolo Koss, an amazing performance, where the body plays a crucial role; and a performance by Alessandro Amaducci (already a guest in past editions of CATODICA), reckless though well aware creator of extreme settings – from eros to thanatos – he masters perfectly through the most up to date technologies.

On January the 21st, opening day of the Trieste Film Festival at the Miela Theatre, CATODICA will be staging a video sequence on screen running in loop for the whole week. Video sequences will always be changing and information on the works shown will be available at the theatre.

The official opening of CATODICA will take place at 18.30 on January the 22nd at Stazione Rogers, with two exceptional events: a swift and explosive live performance by the Gruppo Sinestetico Anche le parole uccidono (Words can kill too) and an interactive sound and vision show, Visual-Sonic Enaction, with active participation of the audience, produced by Pietro Polotti and Maurizio Goina of the Music and New Technologies Department of Trieste Tartini Conservatory.

The Gruppo Sinestetico was founded in 1999 and includes the artists Matteo Albertin, Antonio Sassu and Gianluca Scordo. Their prestigious CV lists participations to the Venice Biennale and other Biennale exhibitions all over the world, from Liverpool to London, from Istanbul to New York’s MoMA, and then Athens, Brazil, India, China…
Visual-Sonic Enaction (VSE) is an interactive “mirror” for the perception and representation of gesture, a sound and vision diversion from the exhibition – in the words of the authors – where the listening is crucial.
On January the 23rd, at 18.30, the Alpe Adria Cinema spot (via Pescheria, 4) will be launched by Francesca De Belli and Antonio Giacomin with their expanded video installation, Urizen, inspired by William Blake’s poem The book of Urizen and the drawings made for it. The synchronized videos, screened on a structure made up of a number of geometric solids, tell us the story of the birth of the mythical Urizen, a character created by Blake, representing reason against imagination and feelings. The geometric structure represents order and the solids are gigantic copies of the pyrite crystals of Navajun (Spain). In the same spot, three video stations will screen part of the programme scheduled for this year’s edition and archive material from previous editions of CATODICA.

One of this year’s novelties is the invaluable contribution of the Music and New Technologies Department of Trieste Tartini Conservatory, led by Professors Paolo Pachini and Pietro Polotti. Works by Francesca Bergamasco, Annalisa Metus, Ivan Penov, Margherita Pevere, Paola Pisani and Andrea Saba will be presented in this year’s programme.
Once again, the Aggiornamenti (Updates) section represents the core of CATODICA’s schedule: the section throws light on the work of Italian, local and international artists of all ages, some of them already well-known to CATODICA’s audience. Through their work we might discover the most diverse combinations of reality and dreaming or odd conceptual theories: for example, in the daily performance by Angelo Pretolani, reported on Facebook; in Bruno Muzzolini’s work, watching a motionless and shaking dog; in the fake song rehearsal of Mi piace by Laura Malacart, based on the strange power relationship between the director/artist and the singer influencing the latter’s performance; in Slovenian artists Mark Požlep and Jaša’s poetic restructuring of an abandoned theatre in Marseille (Time To Become Poets). We will be able to see: the final part of Guillermo Giampietro’s trilogy on image and word: this year, it is a code that confronts itself (Benny Hill Codex); Sonata XM 24 by Elisa Zurlo, still insisting on pulsing bodies shot trough by light; Lucio Perini’s hypothesis (Tertium non datur) swings from evocative statuesque bodies to violence perpetrated on a real one; the ritual and sacred dance in Raga Erhu by the Indian artist living in London Hetain Patel or the totally different Puer Senex by Annalisa Cattani, a refreshing work in which her angelic baby unknowingly discusses of post-modernism…; Rebecca Agnes (well known to CATODICA’s audience), with her new 2009 animated video, showing the long chain of disasters that have struck mankind from time immemorial. Other artists included in this section are: Bibi Agosto, AnnaValeria Borsari, Cecilia Donaggio, Lucia Flego, Iva Kontic, Daniela Michelli, Monica D’Alessandro, Gerlinde Helm, Giordano Rizzardi and Gika Witt.

Another section, From Albania, with the precious contribution of coordinator Suzana Varvanica presents the work of a number of young Albanian artists showing their creative vitality through tales of hystory, irony, paradox, poetic representation of daily life. This section will include works by Dorina Arapi, Dritan Hyska and Sara Bertossi, Nertila Pere, Fani Zguro and Alban Muja.

Finally, the programme presents all the videos made to date within the framework of the project La città radiosa, still under way. Focus of the project, promoted by Gruppo 78, is the portrayal of abandoned places in the city of Trieste and in the Province. The artists are students from the Department of Architecture of the Trieste University under the guidance of Professor Elena Marchigiani (Urban Design) and a number of artists members of Gruppo 78: Fabiola Faidiga, Guillermo Giampietro, Myriam Del Bianco; other artists who participated to the project are: Massimo Premuda/Carlo Pacorini and Carlo Andreasi.
Milan’s Pack Gallery and Berlin’s Davide Gallo Gallery have collaborated to the project.
We particularly acknowledge Massimo Premuda for his collaboration.

Press Release