Giuseppe Spina

For eight years, Ferdinando has stopped speaking with people. In the solitude of his Milan apartment, he cooks, practices singing, and does an improbable form of gymnastics. He is paid to keep company to Genziana, a wealthy and cultured lady, who needs to connect with a deep soul akin to her own. Ferdinando reads her passages of literature. She narrates the happy fragments of her life, now vanished: she is a widow, her children are far away, the house is empty and silent. In his free time, Ferdinando visits modernist architecture and spiritual places. His isolation is interrupted by calls from Domenico, an eccentric who rambles about lofty subjects, aware that he cannot break his friend's mutism.

Impressio in-urbe explores the textures of urban space: the materiality of architecture, perspectives of a city that you will never see. A breakdown of the city’s covering from which the torn, apparently immobile matter emerges. It is the trace that everything and every gesture leaves behind: an identikit (or vivisection) of the space and time of the city. This film has been produced as part of the MADEprogram project (Siracusa)

In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.

At Bologna’s Specola Tower, 1932–1957, an optical technology was invented which would revolutionize astronomy. The tower’s four floors were perforated and a series of hexagonal mirrors was installed at its base, creating a giant telescope of 2×24 meters. A mobile camera was set at right angles to the mirrors and thousands of glass plates where exposed which offered a systematic overview of the city’s zenithal sky. Thirty years of research were necessary for the astronomer Guido Horn D’Arturo to invent the specchio a tasselli—also called multimirror or segmented mirror—an archetype of today’s most advanced telescopes. Horn D’Arturo’s photographic plates are now also full of spots and traces of deteriorated emulsions. This film is composed of scans and blow-ups of these plates.

In the hills at the foot of Mount Etna, three people plan an attack on an undefined institutional centre in Sicily. Their aim: to make the island independent of Italy. A local functionary, with the same ideas in mind, is delighted by this news and organises a meeting. In the meantime, an unfortunate traveling salesman becomes involved in all of this. But the story has a surprising ending.

The artist returns to his studio, at night. Fantasies, anxieties, and memories overlap and come to life, until dawn, when the world resumes its daily routine.

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Même père même mère is the subjective fresco of an African state, it’s an existential research that moves from the conjunction of cinema as movement to travel as movement and vice-versa.

An expressionist reflection on a country's future. The 'l'homme du 4 aout' is former President Sankara, the 'African Che Guevara' who changed the name of Upper Volta on 4 August 1984 to Burkina Faso. His Marxist mission failed, the country is still searching.

Jazz for a Massacre is a tribute to experimental artist and filmmaker Nato Frascà. A musical-pictorial jam-session where Noise of Trouble’s jazz improvisation combines with the abstract forms created by Leonardo Carrano directly and the editing of Giuseppe Spina. Made with 20000 painted, engraved and etched frames.

“Impressio in-urbe” goes through the textures of the urban space: the materiality of architectures, corners and prospectives, the drawings of pavings, the squares, the bricks; it’s a detailed decomposition of the city’s “cloak” from which the broken matter emerges, seemingly immovable but in a continuous connection, in the centuries, inhabited by its moltitude.”Impressio” is the print, the mark which all things and every gesture leave of itself, the “identikit” (and vivisection) of the city’s space and time, which gives back to us its view.

The greek word “zauma” means the angst for the unpredictability of becoming. We often translate it into “wonder”, but this is an improper definition. To assert, like Aristotle did, that every knowledge and every technique come from the wonder is not enough. For Homer, zauma is Polyphemus eating the Odysseus’ comrades, that is to say that it means something more strong and negative than “wonder”. Homeric poems evoke an eerie monstrosity. As it has provoked the whole knowledge and philosophy, zauma is generally intended to be the anguished terror in front of world’s becoming. (E. Severino)

In 2000, group of Romani people of Kosovan origins settled at the foot of Mount Etna. This film depicts a dance dedicated to a bride, a young woman who prepare herself to become wife and mother, the center of a culture. A film as an 'objet trouvé', a show without a show, full of details and life.

A figure hardly emerges from an undefined black space. Màcula has vague contours, lives in the darkness as best he can, his nervous system is unhooked, acrobatic toward the dissolution.

One hundred years since the Mexican Revolution and two hundred years since the independence. Thousands of victims from drug trafficking in a country amongst the most dangerous in the world. Indigenous peoples struggling for dignity, Marxists against imperialism, pharmacies selling cigarettes, 50% of the population dying of starvation, the Zapatista Movement shuts itself off from the outside world, the left is fragmented, the jeopardized right governs. The mixture of vitality and atrocities mark a volatile and yet brewing social situation. Crossing Mexico becomes a political reflection in a sense, both historical and anthropological. Without stopping, the words and images of this film are woven into concepts and feelings, creating a continuous flow, a domino effect in the chain of the contemporary human condition.

During a workshop, the LABA students together with Giulia Mazzone and Giuseppe Spina discover the collection of cinema machines kept by the Museo dell’Industria del Lavoro in Brescia. This visit becomes the leitmotif of a series of thoughts on technological development and on the imaginary of the infinite machine.