Inaudible Fragment
This video is at the same time a mash-up, a found footage, and a situational detournament. Brechtian themes such as revolution, work, meat and communism merge into such Hellzapoppin. The video narrative structure finds its inception in the revolution: Lenin images and Berlin images of the Weimer Republic times are weaved together with another ordinary cowboy movie, which has an Auber’s soundtrack (resembling Masaniello). The images represent the rise and the decline of the 1900s’ communist dream. “That Communist party is not a political party, rather a diabolic and evil life style” Edgar Hoover said, therefore as the soviet communist leaves the reality territories for a journey in the space so does the video. A cow, very similar to the one on the Pink Floyd Atom heart mother’s cover, speaks with Giovanna Dark’s voice, the heroine of 1930’s Brecht play Saint Joan of the stockyards. She reminds us of Simone Weil, but also of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s “Europa ‘51”: “If everybody could understand that work isn’t only a duty but also a conviction, we’d feel all closer one to the other, all equal, all humiliated in the same way, and then we could search for liberation together”.
This emblematic quote touches off the solid metaphor of the orgiastic meat grinder society, the work humiliation happening when society reveals itself as classist, today as much as last century, and when who’s on top doesn’t sense who’s at the bottom, in a distance resembling the one “between the Himalaya and the sea”. Could violence be the only way to put an end to such mess? This is one of Johann Fatzer’s enigmas (protagonist of a 1929 Brecth play, today left in fragments). The video ends with a rich, plunger, capitalist industrialist’s voice who, thanks to the power of the States and Nations, explains us that today, just like in 1929, that “market will heal! Don’t worry!”. Speculation will never come to an end, and the victims will be the whole world and us, like cannon fodder once again!
The Mash-up or REMIX is effective to express concepts immediately and in a punk style, living us in an era resembling that of the 1930s on the XX century, characterized by DADA decoupage vanguards, first installations and readymade. But today in the internet era there’s a big fight that needs to be fought, that of the culture as a common good, and also on Copyright. The critical review of the author rights’ legislation will help culture and internet, which is the vehicle for the future of audiovisual, to remain a common good, saving it from falling into wrong hands, as oligarchies or sects. To do so the governments, instead of securing it and criminalizing who shares it, should study the phenomenon and not surrender to simplifications, which instead determine a revenue of position to big manufacturers, destroying the possibility of everybody else to benefit from the culture as a common good. It’d be necessary to spread the creative commons culture, in particular in those countries, like Italy, where the cultural production is in the doldrums, economically-wise, conceptually-wise and public-wise!
The video was presented preview at the Volksbuehn of Berlin, on the January the 20, 2012, within a festival entitled “Scheiß auf die Ordnung der Welt!” -Shit on the world’s order!- for the preview of a play based on Brecht’ Fatzer, in a retrospective “Norms for the revolution” by B. Di Marino, rerun at the Cinema Massimo in Torino. In February 2012 was exposed at S.A.l.e. Docks in Venice, within the collective exhibition Open4. During the summer 2012 has been casted at the Greek Video art Festival Miden of Kalamata, while during the winter at the New York Remixed media festival. During the 2013 spring was also casted at the MashRome film festival in Rome.