If we tried to listen in silence to the narratives from our time, we would discover that they are voices that are whispering. Whispers of stories contrasted with the cries of History. Under the breath, under the surface, under the silence of the years that pass far from the newspaper columns. Literature and cinema were the first to take up the challenges of these fleeting whispers so difficult to decipher for inattentive ears. The genre of literary memoirs comes to mind, where the intimacy linked to memories and sensations is elevated to a process of artistic incubation, striking examples are the famous classic Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée by Simone de Beauvoir, but also the more recent Les années by Annie Erneaux, both texts in which it is demonstrated how the family takes on a role of primary importance in the creation of the self.
Paolo Bufalini, “Argo”, 2024, Ex convento di S. Mattia, Fondazione Home Movies, Bologna, installation view, ph. Manuel Montesano
There are also numerous connections between the seventh art and the Argo exhibition by Paolo Bufalini. It is no coincidence, in fact, that this exhibition, after being hosted in Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, is being set up for its Bologna stage – we recall that it can only be visited from 12 to 15 December 2024 – in Bologna at the headquarters of the Home Movies Foundation – National Archive of Family Films: the first institution in Italy that since 2002 has been concerned with preserving, enhancing and restoring amateur films that constitute a historical heritage of primary sociological importance. The cinematographic creations that with documentary will and nostalgic tones resume everyday scenes of childhood and youth spent in places that have now disappeared, with people who are now deceased or in eras in which, so to speak, a different music was breathed, are increasingly acclaimed by critics and festival audiences. I am thinking in particular of both Les années super 8, by the Erneaux couple; but also to emerging films like Agathe, Solange et moi, by Louise Narboni, even if the examples are truly innumerable.
Paolo Bufalini, “Argo”, 2024, Ex convento di S. Mattia, Fondazione Home Movies, Bologna, installation view, ph. Manuel Montesano
With the Argo exhibition, Paolo Bufalini (Rome, 1994), working in Bologna, fits into this para-documentary current. A trend that, thanks to the apparent simplicity of form and content, has the merit of welcoming productions in various artistic languages. The artist, breaking down the commonplace according to which intimate and family narratives are better suited to women, enacts a rewriting of real moments that are extracted from temporality (or rather from the presumed and illusory linearity of this); from the physical and perishable reality – that of the body and also of photographic paper – to be transformed into data to be reinterpreted in new languages. The series of images created with the help of artificial intelligence starting from analog photographs taken from family albums are proof of this. In fact, the involuntary modification of the appearance of the artist’s family members, whose analogue portraits had been ruined over time by atmospheric agents, were transposed into the virtual dimension of the digital portrait with such defects incorporated, which therefore did not pertain to the photographed subjects, but rather attributable to the inexorably fast time as well as to the media that had in turn modified them: the light, the sharpness, the naturalness of a smile or the rigidity of a pose are all elements that appear before the gaze of the lens. A continuous rebirth also occurs inside two ampoules that we find on display and that at first glance do not seem connected to the rest of the exhibition. The liquid inside is derived from the fusion of second-hand jewelry, a liquid that can be retransformed with a new fusion into gold. This reminds us of the importance of life in all its forms and dimensions, but also of the possibility of reinventing everything that is material and that surrounds us. The reincarnation of objects is like the reinvention of the past, which transforms itself to become an augmented past, which provocatively and symbolically allows the human being to go beyond the wall erected along the temporal axis, allowing us to act on what happened before our birth. The title, Argo, probably alludes to the name of Jason’s ship used to sail towards the mysterious lands of Colchis, and recalls the idea of travel. In the current exhibition, however, the journey is introspective and dreamlike; with the aim of questioning and investigating one’s own nature rather than conquering the golden fleece.
Paolo Bufalini, “Argo”, Palazzo Ducale Genova, installation view, photo courtesy Palazzo Ducale Genova
The people photographed are the artist’s family members, in particular the father, mother and sister. But the peculiarity is that the usual protagonist of the photographs, that is the gaze, is absent from these portraits. In fact, the people are represented as sleeping. However, this is not a return to the macabre Victorian habit of portraying the deceased as if they were sleeping, but rather a desire to penetrate the most intimate moment of an individual’s life: the night’s rest, during which one is most exposed and vulnerable. From an anti-capitalist perspective, it is instead a question of looking with greater interest at the moment in which one is temporarily free from imposed productivity and the oppression linked to forced consumerism. In the analog versions of the photographs – which cover a time span from the 1950s to the early 2000s – the people were alive, awake and smiling. Instead, the artist makes his new subjects digitally asleep, as if to suggest the dreamlike dimension to which the images generated by our brain and now also by artificial intelligence can be traced.
a cui si possono ricondurre le immagini generate dal nostro cervello e ora anche dalle intelligenze artificiali.
Paolo Bufalini, “Portrait of the mother as a sleeper”, 2024; “Portrait of the sister as a sleeper”, 2024, courtesy of the artist
The light chosen to accompany the spectators inside the exhibition project is more than appropriate. The strong contrast between the two rooms of the exhibition is immediately noticeable: the first is brightly lit, the second immersed in darkness. The contrast stands out even more between the current exhibition and the room that hosts it, a room of a former convent (a refectory of the nuns of the former convent of S. Mattia), whose walls are still partially decorated with frescoes. An artistic dialogue is thus created that bridges the distance of more than five centuries. If the first room is flooded with light, the second instead presents an environment capable of creating an atmosphere that is more silent and dimly lit than ever, as if the spectator himself were entering a bedroom, at night, equipped with a torch. The jet of light that surrounds the prints recalls, in fact, the circle of light of a torch pointed at a target not to be awakened but to be examined, analyzed, discovered, all in religious silence. The aim is to convey the idea of contemplation that is on the one hand specific to the art world, assimilating it also to contemplation towards those we love, just like in Beloved and in The land of nod where the artist’s companion appears asleep and where the values derived from her heartbeat and her breathing become measurable and quantifiable data and are then exposed, made visible as a result, in response to a question: when do we really know someone? When can we say we know who we are? Bufalini’s new exhibition was curated, as part of The Next Real | Art, AI & Society, the series of exhibitions, talks and workshops by the transdisciplinary cultural organization Sineglossa, which deals with informing and making the community reflect on the resources and challenges represented by technological advancement. Paolo Bufalini uses these innovations in order to bring the search for self-knowledge to a new level. An ongoing dialogue with his two previous projects, which make up an autobiographical trilogy where the artist questioned the people from his past, the affections of his present, the media that best knew how to tell us about yesterday, combined with the newest expression forms of our times. What will the next chapter be?
Giulia Gorella
Info:
Paolo Bufalini. Argo
Curated by: Sineglossa | Transdisciplinary cultural organization
12/12/2024-15/12/2024
Ex convento di S. Mattia, Fondazione Home Movies – Archivio nazionale dei film di famiglia
Via Sant’Isaia 20 Bologna
Opening hours: Thursday 12 December 18 – 21, Friday 13 December 9 – 18, Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 from 14 to 18
Free admission
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