REWINDItalia. Early Video Art in Italy

In the 70s and 80s, Italy was a fertile ground for the experimentation of video as art practice. At the time, the most relevant Italian video art centres – which included art/tapes/22, Centro Video Arte in Ferrara, Videoteca Giaccari in Varese and Galleria del Cavallino in Venice – produced and exhibited fundamental early video artworks by Italian, European and American pioneers. The Italian video art centres attracted internationally renowned artists from all over the world.

In 2011 the British video pioneer and researcher Stephen Partridge was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to develop the research project REWINDItalia (2011-2014) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, following the successful AHRC funded research project REWIND (2004 – ongoing), led by Partridge himself, which since its beginning has recovered more than 500 British early video artworks. REWINDItalia aimed to investigate: why and how Italy provided such a key platform for the experimentation of video that at the time was a new medium for the arts; whether it was possible to identify any particularly “Italian” aspect in that activity and the circumstances in which it took place; the reasons why in the late 70s/early 80s this experimentation became more marginalised and early video in Italy has been always kept to the margins in the mainstream cultural sector; the legacy of this analogue experimentation on digital contemporary artists’ video.

REWINDItalia did not aim to migrate to digital analogue videos but focused on the emergence and exceptional development of early video art in Italy and aimed to trace the many histories video art practice and theory in Italy in the 70s and 80s and bring them back under the international spotlight.

A key issue investigated by REWINDItalia was how Italian artists – coming from different experiences, contexts and backgrounds (including traditional visual art forms, poetry, music, and film) approached video and how they viewed the possibilities it presented as a new medium. It emerged that video art in Italy played as a fundamental platform to experiment different mediums and practices connected to technology, interactivity and ‘intermediality’ and how video co-concurred to the development of different arts and their hybridisation and ultimately to media arts.

The investigation of medium specificity – which was particularly relevant for Cavallino artists in the same way it had been in other countries, including the UK – stimulated for example a cross-fertilisation of music and visual arts in the work of artists as Michele Sambin and the composer Claudio Ambrosini, and video poetry in that of Luigi Viola.

An exceptional example of ‘intermedial’ and interdisciplinary approach to the medium and media convergence in Italy are Luca Maria Patella’s early videos that were uncovered and reassessed by REWINDItalia after more than thirty years of oblivion. This group of videos – which included Grammatica dissolvente – Gazzùff! Avventure & cultura – showed how Patella employed video as a multimedia platform to incorporate film, prints, artists’ books, photography, performance and slides. These media – as video itself -were what Patella defined media  “without weight”. These media using non-traditional techniques escaped the pitfalls of a ‘physical, moralistic, artistic weight’ (but also cultural and political), typical of traditional techniques.

Patella’s videos are also a rare visual documentation of the machine – invented by the artist himself and now dismembered – for ‘manual and musical varied fading’, that was composed of two projectors and allowed to alternate and merge images and text in a balanced and modulated sequence that could be closely controlled by the artist, anticipating many effects later produced with the digital.

Cover of REWINDItalia. Early Video Art in Italy/ I primi anni della videoarte in Italia, edited by Laura Leuzzi and Stephen Partridge (John Libbey Publishing, New Barnet 2015)