Alterazioni Video's new project, on the ruins of Nuoro's unfinished sports hall

Alterazioni Video, the collective founded in Milan in 2004 and composed of Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu and Giacomo Porfiri, brings its new project to Sardinia: in fact, at the Nivola Museum in Orani (Nuoro), the exhibition Appunti per un parco incompiuto, curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda and Concettina Ghis, is scheduled from October 30, 2021 to February 13, 2022. The collective, whose research path focuses on misinformation and the relationship between truth/representation, legality/illegality, freedom/censorship, in which art is strongly intertwined withpolitical activism, since 2006 he has been working on Incompiuto, a project focused, in its first phase, on the mapping and geolocation of 696 unfinished works scattered on Italian soil, architectural structures begun and never completed, subsidized with public funds. Incompiuto now enters the second phase, which involves a series of changes of use of the architectures. Left structurally untouched as monuments of the present, these should become multipurpose places for citizens to gather for outdoor cultural and sports activities, such as parks, gardens, auditoriums, and theaters.

It is Nuoro’s Palasport, a scenic ruin lost in the countryside beyond the last urban offshoots, that is the protagonist of the exhibition at the Nivola Museum. Started in the late 1990s, contracted in 2012, the project was finally shelved in 2017: what remains is a forest of concrete hubbed pylons, a mammoth entrance gate, a barren esplanade surrounded by piles of debris and wild vegetation. Alterations Video proposes to reverse the failure in a positive way, turning the abandoned construction site into a park. It invites us to “kiss the toad,” to reappropriate the ungainly and neglected ruin by accepting and using it.

The collective celebrates the unfinished in a film, the centerpiece of the intervention at the Nivola Museum, which unfolds on two parallel narrative planes: that of theencounters between the characters within the filmic fiction, at times surreal and magical, in which time seems to stand still, and that of the filming on the set theater of these encounters, which brings us back to a reality and a present in the making. Various characters move through the Palasport: the visionary campground warden who has discovered how to travel through space-time, a young tiktoker lost in the brambles, two American musician tourists, and a dowsing surveyor, along with other extras (the village boys, a shepherd, law enforcement). Each character embodies some of the characters described by Alterazioni Video in the Manifesto of the Unfinished: beauty and terribleness (the tiktoker and the guardian), the awkward and corrupt past that loses its way (the diviner surveyor), the audience that, like the chorus in Greek tragedies, becomes an active part of the process of transforming the place (the musician tourists playing among the ruins), the local community (the boys in the bar).

The entrance door of the Palasport, the only covered space at the site, which the characters pass through to travel in space-time, becomes the multidimensional threshold that connects the various unfinished buildings scattered around Italy, as in one big archaeological park of the unfinished, an expression of the visionary and magical thinking of the designers.With this film, Alterazioni Video recounts the Unfinished through a new interpretative key. The phenomenon is explored in its complexity by means of a plurality of registers, from the epic (the heroic deeds of beauty against the beast) to the fairy-tale (the Palasport wants to become a park as the puppet aspires to become a child), to the realistic-documentary (the making of Palasport Nuoro).

The cinematic language mixes the classics( Shakespeare’sThe Tempest, with the Palasport/island finding its Caliban in the figure of the guardian), the tragicomic Pasolini of La Ricotta (the narrative double-stories, the fiction and filming on the real set, but also the tiktoker eating the guardian’s food supply), the Youtube-style neorealism meeting the stereotypes of spaghetti westerns and science fiction. Sounds made from the concrete rebar iron of the Palasport form the film’s soundtrack, created in collaboration with Travis McCoy Fuller and Rudi Fischerlehner. Accompanying the project at the Nivola Museum is an installation created by Alterazioni Video in Olbia Airport, which can be seen in the arrivals area until February 2022. For all info you can visit the Nivola Museum website.

Alterazioni Video's new project, on the ruins of Nuoro's unfinished sports hall

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