Bologna, MAMbo brings Yuri Ancarani's film Atlantis to exhibition

From Feb. 2 to May 7, 2023, MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna once again transforms the space of the Sala delle Ciminiere, historically intended for exhibitions, installations and special initiatives, to accommodate the new exhibition project of Yuri Ancarani (Ravenna, 1972): it is Atlantide 2017 - 2023, an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Balbi that is part of the ART CITY Bologna 2023 schedule, the institutional program of exhibitions, events and special initiatives promoted by the Municipality of Bologna and BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera. Atlantis 2017 - 2023 is realized with the support of the Trust for Contemporary Art, thanks to main sponsor Gruppo Hera, in partnership with PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea di Milano and IWONDERFULL, in collaboration with I Wonder Pictures, Dugong Films and Rai Cinema.

The project conceived for MAMbo by Ancarani, a visual artist and filmmaker, stands as an “explosion” of the film Atlantide, which premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival in 2021 and, following that, in numerous international festivals: a journey inside the research process and the numerous materials produced over a period of about six years, before, during and after the making of the film, on which the artist made a selection, giving them a new formalization. In an immersive atmosphere, the audience will thus be able to follow an extra-narrative that goes beyond the feature film, through a series of never-before-seen content produced for the exhibition.

The film (a Dugong Films production with Rai Cinema in co-production with Luxbox and Unbranded Pictures) features Daniele, a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island in the Venice lagoon. He lives by expedients, and is also marginalized by the group of his peers, who share an intense life of leisure, which is expressed in the religion of the barchino: a cult centered on the elaboration of ever more powerful engines, which transform the small lagoon motorboats into dangerous racing beasts. Daniele, too, dreams of a record-breaking barque that would take him to the top of the leaderboard. But everything he does to realize his dream and earn the respect of others ends up turning against him, tragically. The degradation that erodes the relationships, environment, and practices of a generation adrift is observed through the eyes of the timeless landscape of Venice. The point of no return is a baleful, residual story of male initiation, violent and predestined to failure, which explodes dragging the ghost town into a psychedelic shipwreck trip. Atlantis was constructed and realized through the relationships the director developed over time with the boys who became part of the cast, almost all non-actors, their life stories, their relationship with Venice.

Recounts Ancarani, "Atlantis is a film born without a script. The dialogues are stolen from real life, and the story developed into becoming during an observation of about four years, following the lives of the boys. This working method gave me the opportunity to overcome the traditional design limitation in filmmaking: first writing and then making. Thus the film was able to reactively record this moment of great change in Venice and the lagoon, from a difficult-to-perceive point of view, attentive to the gaze of teenagers. The desire to experience their lives so closely, inside their little boats, made everything else possible: the film slowly built itself."

In the film, although the narrative revolves around Daniele and the other teens, the uniqueness of the lagoon city emerges as a major protagonist. So too at MAMbo the focus is the Venice-Atlantis recreated by the artist. A city that is difficult to define, suffocated by tourist exploitation, constantly under environmental threats that affect the whole planet but become particularly pregnant here. A place whose inhabitants, now reduced to fewer than 50,000, live poised between the need to fight not to be submerged by lagoon waters and unstoppable waves of tourism and the temptation to abandon the struggle and leave the city to its fate. At the same time, from a broader perspective, Ancarani’s Venice loses its geographic and urban connotation and becomes a symbol, an ideal representation of the decadence of capitalism, an exemplary place to depict a global problem. At the end of the journey, one realizes how these problems, these issues, do not only concern Venice or Venetians, but involve us all closely.

The despair of adolescence, the decay of Venice, the degradation of the environment and relationships are the major themes that also run through the exhibition Atlantis 2017 - 2023, which can be read as a single choral work: the film is presented in a room of the museum as a piece of a larger project that includes a series of new works.

Lorenzo Balbi writes about the exhibition, “In and around the Ciminiere Hall Ancarani recreates an unreal place, perhaps emerged or perhaps submerged, pervaded by darkness, fog and laser lights. In this non-place, visitors physically come into contact with the artist’s Venice-Atlantis: an imaginary or perhaps real place, made of simple but disorienting images: a priest relentlessly sweeping the water under a portego with a broom, an impromptu musician strumming an accordion on a fondamenta in front of a dry vaporetto, two guys on a barge getting dressed after consummating a relationship in the lagoon, a girl being taken blindfolded to see the sticker with her own name just attached to her boyfriend’s barge. These are any images of Venetian life, images seemingly out of the ordinary but for that reason all the more real and effective.”

The materials presented are varied and in some cases they are actual short films, also the result of Ancarani’s documentary work in Venice (this is the case, for example, with the footage of the demonstration against the large ships in the lagoon or the boat transport of an electrical appliance from Burano to Rialto, seen through the movements of a bug on the fixing ropes). Also on view at the exhibition will be the double video-installation set up in the center of the Ciminiere Hall in which the audience will rediscover the psychedelic character of the finale of Atlantis, with unseen scenes, beams of colored lights from Daniele’s barge projecting onto the Venetian palaces, and music by Sick Luke and Lorenzo Senni/Francesco Fantini being played synchronously by an orchestra on the screen in front. Also released for Edizioni MAMbo on the occasion of Atlantis 2017 - 2023 is the unpublished screenplay for Atlantis, adapted by Patrizia Pistagnesi, a critic, lecturer, screenwriter and creator of TV series, who created a text after the making of the film, which was born precisely without a screenplay, with spontaneous dialogues. The publication is enriched by an unpublished text by Lorenzo Balbi and a selection of stills from the film.

Yuri Anacarani will also be in Bologna at Arte Fiera 2023: he is in fact the protagonist of the first edition of Led Wall Commission, which will see the presence at the entrance to Piazza Costituzione of a 5x9-meter mega-screen on which his video content will be visible to those who cross the threshold of the fairgrounds. Also as part of the program of meetings organized by Arte Fiera, the script published by Edizioni MAMbo will be presented. Finally, an anthological exhibition will be dedicated to the artist at the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan from March 28 to June 11, 2023, curated by Diego Sileo and Iolanda Ratti with a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, which will emphasize the dialogue and connection between the two exhibitions, Bologna and Milan.

For all information you can visit the Bologna Museums website.

Bologna, MAMbo brings Yuri Ancarani's film Atlantis to exhibition

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