Giulia Mazzone

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.

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.

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.