Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984)

We are delighted to invite you on May 9th 2023, 3-4pm ET, to the launch of the upcoming volume Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984), edited by Jennifer Malvezzi and Flora Pitrolo, at NY Franklin Furnace's LOFT.

This event celebrates a new monograph which for the first time comprehensively chronicles the practice of Milan-based duo Taroni-Cividin and sets it into today’s context. Active between 1977 and 1984, their work constitutes one of the most groundbreaking yet rarely traversed areas of the Italian experimental performance archive, in interaction with visual and installation work and through a highly personal use of video and audio technologies.

Artist Roberto Taroni and the book’s authors will show and discuss material from the Taroni-Cividin archive. In particular, the discussion takes its cue from Taroni-Cividin’s performance Real Thing (1979) at Franklin Furnace, to investigate – in collaboration with the audience – the almost mythical importance of New York as city, scene and locus in Italian experimental work of those years and to ask if and how that traffic moved both ways.

The event will take place online, in Franklin Furnace's LOFT via Zoom.

Check out the Book Launch Tour around the globe:

20/04/23
LADA - Live Art Development Agency, London ➤ Find out more

22/04/23
MAC - Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon ➤ Find out more

09/05/23
Franklin Furnace Archive, New York ➤ Find out more

19/05/23
Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

21/05/23
M HKA - Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen

06-09/09/23
FilmForum, Udine, Università degli Studi di Udine

13/09/23
Museo del Novecento di Milano

20/09/23
CAPAS - Centro per le Attività e le Professioni delle Arti e dello Spettacolo, Università degli Studi di Parma

The practice of Taroni-Cividin constitutes one of the most groundbreaking areas of the international experimental landscape. Active between 1977 and 1984, the two artists pushed at the edges of cinema and of performance, of the live and the recorded, developing a very personal language that continues to generate questions in some of the present time's most pressing debates. Taroni-Cividin. Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984) seeks to do justice to the complexity and richness of Taroni-Cividin's work, giving the reader a sense of the theoretical perspectives that guided it, bringing to light precious archival materials, and critically re-examining a season of Italian contemporary art which has thus far been largely neglected.

Contents

Taroni-Cividin Kaleidoscope. Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977–1984)
Simone Venturini

Taroni-Cividin as Diamond Clearness
Jennifer Malvezzi, Flora Pitrolo

NEW STUDIES

The Missed Theater: Taroni-Cividin and Theatricality
Flora Pitrolo

The Last Possible Avant-garde. Time and Moving Image in Taroni-Cividin’s Expanded Cinema
Jennifer Malvezzi

Atypical and Utopian: the Integral Performance of Taroni-Cividin
Caterina Iaquinta

WRITINGS

Interference
Luisa Cividin, Roberto Taroni

Soufflée Letter to Four Friends
Roberto Taroni

The Shift of the Eye, or, the Waste of the Eye
Roberto Taroni

ARCHIVE

For “Cividin/Taroni”
Gianni Manzella

On Seeing and Understanding Images. Notes on the Work of Taroni-Cividin
Georg F. Schwarzbauer

Taroni-Cividin. Excess of Clues
Rossella Bonfiglioli

From Which, Exceptionally, Nothing Can Be Drawn (Superimposed onto Cividin/Taroni)
Giorgio Verzotti

APPENDICES
compiled by Giulia Govi Cavani

Performances
Films
Videos
Films and Video Screenings
Awards
Annotated Performance Works
Bibliography

Biographies