Curated by Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni

ARTISTS’ FILM INTERNATIONAL – XI EDITION
Artist selected by the GAMeC
JACOPO MILIANI
DESERTO, 2017

The GAMeC’s participation continues in the Artists’ Film International, the prestigious network dedicated to video art which, since 2008, has involved some of the most important international contemporary art institutions, along with artists from all around the world.

For the eleventh edition of the event – of which the theme is that of ‘gender’ – the curators Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni have selected the artist Jacopo Miliani (Florence, 1979). One of the rooms on the first floor of the museum will be entirely dedicated to Miliani’s work, with the screening of the video work Deserto (2017) and TEOREMA TEOREMA TEOREMA (2018), the continuation of his work dedicated to Pasolini.

Deserto reflects on the possibility to speak of multiple identities through the invention of a new language. The desert, the scenario used at the end of the films Teorema (1968) by Pier Paolo Pasolini and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert by Stephan Elliot, is used by the artist as an ideal meeting place between the two protagonists: the Guest (an enigmatic stranger, both angelical and demoniacal, who seduces an entire bourgeois family) and Bernadette (a transgender woman), both played by the same actor, Terence Stamp. The desert is evoked by Miliani as a place in which the sand never takes on a specific and definitive form.

An enigmatic body, long nails with red nail varnish, a new sign language, a voice, a text, dance and photography: these are the elements that breathe life into a dense interplay of visual stimuli, in which verbal and visual languages go hand in hand with sensorial and sensual lexicon.

The special project TEOREMA TEOREMA TEOREMA, on the other hand, is the ideal development of Deserto. In this new video production – created in collaboration with the GAMeC especially for this edition of the Artists’ Film International – Miliani lays down the bases for a further reflection on the famous film by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The protagonist of the video is the Parisian performer Matyouz: dancer, Master of Ceremonies and commentator for the key Vogue Contests in Europe.
‘Vogueing’ is a contemporary dance style based on the imitation of the stock poses and gestures of models featured on catwalks or in glossy magazines such as the famous Vogue itself, from which the dance takes its name. Becoming part of mainstream culture in the early 1990s as a characteristic of the underground, gay and transgender scene of
Harlem, the origins of this style date back to the previous decades.
Matyouz’s voice and performance contextualise the Pasolinian paradigms, drawing on the idea of the ‘truth- interview’ with which the 1968 film opens, just like in Deserto, also in TEOREMA TEOREMA TEOREMA the hands of the performer tell a story and, albeit in a different form, we rediscover common ground between verbal and visual
languages.

Deserto and TEOREMA TEOREMA TEOREMA will be visible at the GAMeC throughout the event, as part of the calendar of screenings featuring the works proposed by the other participating institutions: Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø; Project 88, Mumbai; Hanoi DOCLAB, Hanoi; KWM Art Center, Beijing.