Animare gli archivi

The review stems from the desire to identify a meaningful and expressively productive relationship between archival cinema and animated techniques. Following a chronological path from the 1930s to contemporary times, the selection presents paths, movements and authors that have defined paradigmatic horizons and significant emergencies towards animated archival reuse. The aim is to propose an active dialogue between usually distant disciplinary fields, such as archival documentary and animation, in order to advance unprecedented interpretative perspectives and point out transitions, genealogies and formal and conceptual persistences inherent in the same realization practices.
The selection operates in a Western geographic context with films of European and North American production and is organized around two programs, each focusing on a specific figurative landscape. The first program is devoted to archival images that are freely painted. It ranges from films exhibiting direct interventions of painting, acid etching and abrasion on impressed film to electronic and digital practices of archival manipulation (infographics, AASCII code, glitching and datamoshing). The second program, on the other hand, is based on the practice of collage through works that, starting from the collage-film configuration, employ, from time to time, both the artisanal techniques of cut-out and the computerized techniques of digital compositing.
The review is conceived according to a transdisciplinary orientation that holds together different languages and artistic contexts. Thus it is that historicized authors of experimental and underground cinema coexist with undisputed masters of artist and experimental animation, visual artists and video artists are brought closer to computer graphic designers, net.artists and videomakers, in order to show how the reuse of animated archives is nevertheless the child of that tension characteristic of contemporary found footage film that wants to overcome disciplinary fences by operating in the fertile and borderline places between cinema and contemporary art.

Giacomo Ravesi