Microscope is excited to welcome back Italian artist Alice Guareschi to the gallery for a screening of her 50-minute video Autobiography of a house.
The medium-length work was prompted by two surprising discoveries about the Italian surrealist artist Giordano Falzoni — a visionary painter, actor, inventor of optical games, as well as the “Schiacciaparole” and “Schiacciafarfalle”, dream machines maker, friend and translator of André of Breton. First Guareschi learned from the newspapers on the day following Falzoni’s death in 1998 that he had been living in Milan in the apartment next door to hers in her building in Milan. Later in Bologna, during a university class, the professor Italian experimental filmmaker Alberto Grifi, mentioned Falzoni in the context of his own work, as one of his closest friends and collaborators, and protagonist of his 1971 film “Il Grande Freddo”.
Autobiography of a house shows the artist following Grifi with her video camera as he searches through dozens of boxes of his archive for materials relating to Falzoni. Letters and other documents, photographs, drawings, and works on paper, among others, are slowly unearthed and captured by Guareschi’s camera, accompanied by Grifi’s personal memories and other commentary. Eventually Grifi plays film and video footage he shot of Falzoni over the years, including one of his last trips to the Sardinian town of Cagliari for an exhibition of his artworks, where he appears to be in poor health.
Throughout the movie, the artist looks through her viewfinder at Grifi who looks at Falzoni on a monitor, creating a chain of admiration and inspiration. Guareschi simultaneously reveals the worlds of two influential but yet overlooked Italian artists. Falzoni’s world, which she had to travel so far to learn about, had been just on the other side of the wall of her apartment.
Guareschi reflects upon the lives of people living in the same house or building with a quote from George Perec:
“The inhabitants of a single building live a few inches from each other, they are separated by a mere partition wall, they share the same spaces repeated along each corridor, they perform the same movements at the same times, turning on a tap, flushing the water closet, switching on a light, laying the table, a few dozen simultaneous existences repeated from story to story, from building to building, from street to street.”
Alice Guareschi will be in attendance and available for Q&A following the screening.
A site-specific installation by Guareschi is on view at Le Petit Versailles garden at 346 East Houston Street through October 21st.
Program:
Autobiography of a house
Video8/miniDV, color, 2002, 50 minutes
“As though following the lines of a strange geometry, the encounter with the independent Italian filmmaker Alberto Grifi and, within his tale, with Giordano Falzoni, a post-surrealist painter, writer, poet, friend of Andrè Breton, as well as the protagonist and collaborator on a number of Grifi’s films, who I discovered lived on my floor, without me having realized it.”
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Alice Guareschi (Italy, 1976) lives and works in Milan, Italy. Her work includes a wide range of media such as writing, sculpture and video. She holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna. In 2005 she was resident artist at the Palais de Tokyo’s Le Pavillon in Paris, and in 2008 she was awarded with the Young Italian Art’s grant promoted by the Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum’s Friends Supporters. Solo shows include Galleria Alessandro De March (Milano), Centre Culturel Français (Milano), Galleria Sonia Rosso (Torino), Castello di Rivoli (Torino), Microscope Gallery, Galerie DREI (Cologne) and Joey Ramone Gallery (Rotterdam). Group shows include Exit. Nuove geografie dell’arte in Italia, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino); The Final Cut, Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Aperto per Lavori in Corso, PAC (Milano); XV Quadriennale, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Roma); Disarming Matter, Dunkers Kulturhus (Helsingborg); Fantasmata, Arge/Kunst Galleria Museo (Bolzano); Il Belpaese dell’Arte, Gamec Galleria Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Bergamo); This and There, Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (Paris); Autoritratti, MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna (Bologna); Andata e ricordo: souvenir de voyage, Mart Contemporary Art Museum (Rovereto); Portrait of the Artist as Young (Wo)Man, Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum (Torino); Tutta l’Italia è silenziosa, Accademia di Spagna and Accademia Tedesca (Roma); Due South, Delaware Contemporary (Philadelphia).