What effect does the historical context of a building, a location, or even a song have on our experience of it? ALT/KINO presents six films that adopt experimental forms to reckon with spaces with traumatic pasts.
“Can a door be fascist?” asked Rossella Biscotti and Kevin van Braak in their research into the transformation of Italian fascist architecture. From observation to abstraction, the conventions of the horror genre to flicker films, these works, including shorts by Esther Urlus and Tony Cokes, take different approaches to exploring what form oppression takes and how places may or may not inherently contain vestiges of past violence.
Restoration of an Empty Pool
Rossella Biscotti / Kevin van Braak, 2007, 10 min
The slow process of cleaning the swimming pool in Mussolini’s forum in Rome. A tiny man moves about, scrubbing and patching within the vast empty space of the pool. Behind him, murals of heroic, gigantic athletes cover the walls.
Government House
Herwig Weisers, 2017, 11 min
After a time-lapse from day to night, we see ghostly figures flicker through darkened hallways with plastic tracers and a horror film vibe.
Monelle
Diego Marcon, 2018, 14 min
A number of little girls lie asleep between the intersections and the architectural elements of the Casa del Fascio in Como, designed by Giuseppe Terragni—one of the most important modernist architecture.
I Am the Daughter of Dead-Fathers
Miriam Sampaio, 2018, 10 min
Sampaio shows in detail the vestiges of the Lisbon detention centre of Portugal’s former state police, PIDE, just before it was renovated and converted into luxury apartments, where anti-fascists were interrogated and tortured and where she suspects her own father was held in the 1960s.
Deletion
Esther Urlus, 2017, 12 min
Does your view of an image change when you know something horrific or disturbing took place in it? Even though you may not see (or recognize) anything? Is this “not seeing” essential to boost the imagination?
Evil.16 (Torture.Musik)
Tony Cokes, 2009-11, 17 min
Animated excerpts from an article by Moustafa Bayoumi that was originally published in The Nation magazine on December 26, 2005. The article is a key and cogent text in a body of reportage and scholarship devoted to the military use of music and sound as a weapon, a form of psychological manipulation, or torture.
This event is presented as part of the 2020 London Short Film Festival and will feature an introduction by ALT/KINO’s Ben Nicholson and filmmakers Miriam Sampaio and Diego Marcon.