Concept

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This is a performance-based art film, a layered and multifaceted cinematic experience, a work made of collaged hybridizations. The film was made by combining historical archival footage, selected from the film Archive collected by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, and original performance art pieces that I conceived inspired by the repertoire itself.

The film brings together materials very heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible but united by the macro-theme of avant-garde art: how this idea is interpreted by an artist who lives it as a daily practice, and how this concept was articulated by Istituto Luce, keeper of the sacred and secular aspects of Italian history and society since 1927.

The film moves between provocative body-art and body-manipulation scenes, visually engaging ideas and mesmerizing scenarios and costumes, disturbing living installations, and the celebration of feminine beauty and strength.

At the center of the story is an Ophelia who is different from the one-handed down by the literary tradition: not a shy and fragile teenager, but many women of different colors, features, and ages. A modern and bittersweet Ophelia. An Ophelia who in the end does not drown, rejecting her destiny as a romantic heroine to become a "normal person."

The film triggers a confrontation between Past and Present, between the footage from Istituto Luce Archives - that conceptually and aesthetically seems to make everything eternal and absolute - and performance art, which by its own nature it rather reveals the ephemeral and contingent nature of any human enterprise.

On one hand, the Italian national historical repertoire, collected and preserved by Istituto Luce, with its anthropological documentaries, its surrealist jewels and pure cinematic propaganda. On the other hand, original performances art actions characterized by what I call “ancestral feminism”, decontextualizing, desecrating, and substantially undermining any original ideological assumption of the Archive itself.

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