Synchronized installation for Archive Materials

by Studio Azzurro, 2024

«Multiple electronic images have been resting dormant in the Studio Azzurro Archive for more than forty years. By awakening them, with the touch of editing softwares’ digital fingers, they immediately show an unexpected vitality, pushing them to bind themselves to other awakening companions through a sonic and musical thread that will inextricably unite them. We have tried to put order to this vitality by using a particular pattern that has been often used in our work, meaning the four natural elements’ sequence. Here beginning with WATER, then moving on to EARTH and FIRE, and finally AIR. We have laid these fragments, these visual segments –  discarded or partially used – in different designs and sound contexts, in an evocative cradle –  the “editor’s bin” –  to deliberately recall our filmic origins as well».
Studio Azzurro, 2024

When static moving images would only dwell in the celluloid tapes of film, it was fascinating to see, or rather perceive, their propensity not to stop. In a sense, to go on living. The clippings, the final scraps of film that ended up in the editor’s basket – the “bin” – which was actually a fabric pocket held open by a metal frame, coming out of the vortex of the moviola plates, would continue to flounder, as if they were caught or possessed by a motion of their own, a life that was not inclined to abandon them and that would arise every time another final scrap was added to the others. The remaining clips, the luckier ones, the ones that the skillful eye of the editor and the delirium of the director thought to reuse, would remain hanging, straddling a perch, like cacio cheese, waiting their turn.
It seems impossible but even today, in the universe of the electronic, virtual and immaterial world, the images which are discarded or dormant in a digital archive, in an intangible cloud, do manifest that propensity to demonstrate their vitality.

Studio Azzurro
In 1982 Fabio Cirifino, Paolo Rosa and Leonardo Sangiorgi gave birth to an experience that over the years explored the poetic and expressive possibilities of new technological cultures; they were joined in 1995 by Stefano Roveda. Through the creation of video environments, sensitive and interactive environments, they draw an artistic path across traditional disciplines and form a working group open to different contributions and important collaborations.
Artistic research, at first, is oriented toward the creation of video environments, in which the integration of electronic image and physical environment is experimented with. Works such as The Swimmer (1984) and Views (1985), in which the elements of the human figure and nature recur, are designed according to the spatial and social context that is to accommodate them.
A new interest in issues of interactivity and multimedia emerged in 1995, with the creation of works termed sensitive environments, including Tavoli (1995)and Coro (1995).These are environments in which technology merges with narrative and space. In 2002, Mediterranean Meditations, an exhibition consisting of five “unstable landscapes,” interactive installations on the theme of Mediterranean identity, was presented at Castel S. Elmo in Naples and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. This work marks the beginning of a new need for confrontation with the territory and its identity, which converges previous experiments toward the design of multimedia museum routes.
This confrontation with the values of memory and place also greatly influences the artistic journey, giving rise to a new cycle of works, called Portatori di storie. The first works of this project, are presented in Casablanca, with Sensible Map, at the Santa Fe International Biennial, with The Fourth Staircase and at the Shanghai World Expo 2010, with Sensitive City.