ART TORRENTS: Studio Azzurro - Synchronized Videos (1989

Studio Azzurro - Synchronized Videos (1989 - 2000)
Thursday, April 17, 2008

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Studio Azzurro is an artistic research studio, that bases its expression on the languages afforded by recent technology. It was first set up in 1982 by Fabio Cirifino (photography), Paolo Rosa (visual arts and film) and Leonardo Sangiorgi (graphics and animation). In 1995 Stefano Roveda, an expert in interactive systems, joined the group.
For over twenty years, Studio Azzurro has been investigating the poetic and expressive potential of these systems that have had such an impact on relations in this age. Through video-environments, sensitive and interactive environments, theatrical performances and films, it has blazed a trail that is now acknowledged worldwide, by countless major artistic and theatrical institutions and events. In addition to experimental work, the groups activities are also tied in with more formative experiences such as the designing of museums and theme exhibitions whose cultural value has been recognised at all levels. In both cases, Studio Azzurro has taken care to create communicative environments that require an active and significant participation on behalf of the spectator who is part of the narrative structure, inspired by a use of multitextual approach and a continous shift between virtual and real elements.

The Synchronized videos are made up of two or more videos transmitted simultaneously. The videos are set up in order to restore an organic nature to what is viewed. It is like holding a continuous dialogue at times moving along together, sometimes involving an exchange, and at other times there is a meeting to create a single scene.

Il combattimento di Ettore e Achille (1989) aka The battle between Hector and Achilles (1989)

Two screens, two simultaneous points of view, two eyes that focus on this episode taken from Homer's epic. At times the images match as happens with human vision, and at other times they are separate and interchangeable, as happens with thought. The screens, placed side by side, recreate scenes and landscapes and the images of the actors move from one space to the next in a constant swapping of identities and roles. The emotions are heightened by the drawn out alienated time scale of the narration and the spread out slow motion of the action. The memory of the fight seeps into the landscapes' very texture, winds its way into the dancer's bodies, and a true synthesis is reached, devoid of all mythical allusion or epic reconstruction.

Aleksander Nevskij Video (1989)

Thanks to editing, excerpts from Ejzenstejn’s film and footage of a concert performance of Prokofiev’s cantata come together in the video with the aim of interpenetrating through the use of video processing. The performers in the film and concert appear side by side in the same picture. As was the idea of both Ejzenstejn and Prokofiev, who worked in close contact for the film and composition’s production, the video aims to retrace this co-operation, reinventing a series of associations between the musical content and a number of images from the film.
A particular succession of structural cross-references represent an effort to fuse genres and languages – musical, cinematographic, and the strictly video-electronic one.

Trittico Marghera (2000) aka Marghera triptych (2000)

Porto Marghera, the search for signs in a poisoned, hard, landscape. One finds a few life forms - an embryo of fertility mixed in with the remains of a people that has lived and suffered there, and has found its own identity in this suffering. Small indications of life that are confronted by immense empty or devastated spaces. Vast cathedrals, rusty machinery, reinforced concrete bunkers threatened by minute cracks - small havens for new vegetation. Hell has burnt itself out and left space for the first signs of life. The gaze examines, searches and focuses on the microscopic presences in the pools, beneath the layers of dust, amidst the lightness of feathers. What we see materialises on three screens that synchronise the impressions, emotions, and fears.

Trittico di sale (2000) aka Salt's triptych (2000)

Trittico di sale was specially produced for the “2000 anni luce” exhibition at the Parmigiani Museum in Reggio Emilia. We set up this small piece of work entitled Trittico di sale comprising three opaque glass screens supported by a salt base. The subject, light, was portrayed using the whiteness of a Trapani salt deposit as the starting point. It is so dazzling that it tends to burn the space the image occupies, just as the evocations of the wind in Salvatore Sciarrino's music (La perfezione di uno spirito sottile), wich runs parallel to the image tends to silence. Trittico di sale is part of a series we entitled Miniatures, small works with a clear narrative development that we installed at different historic locations such as Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome.