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CAN A DOOR BE FASCIST?
21:00 Tue 14 Jan 2020
What effect does the historical context of a building, a location, or even a song have on our experience of it? ALT/KINO presents six films that adopt experimental forms to reckon with spaces with traumatic pasts.
“Can a door be fascist?” asked Rossella Biscotti and Kevin van Braak in their research into the transformation of Italian fascist architecture. From observation to abstraction, the conventions of the horror genre to flicker films, these works, including shorts by Esther Urlus and Tony Cokes, take different approaches to exploring what form oppression takes and how places may or may not inherently contain vestiges of past violence.
Guest programmed by Ben Nicholson. 75’
ICA
SW1Y 5AH
Access
Please find all access information here, or drop a line to Helen MacKenzie at access@shortfilms.org.uk for more information or special requests.
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RESTORATION OF AN EMPTY POOL
Rossella Biscotti / Kevin van Braak 10 mins (IT, 2007)
The slow process of cleaning the swimming pool in Mussolini’s forum in Rome. A tiny man moves about, scrubbing and patching within the vast empty space of the pool. Behind him, murals of heroic, gigantic athletes cover the walls. -
GOVERNMENT HOUSE
Herwig Weisers 11 mins (AT, 2017)
After a time-lapse from day to night, we see ghostly figures flicker through darkened hallways with plastic tracers and a horror film vibe. -
MONELLE
Diego Marcon 14 mins (IT, 2018)
A number of little girls lie asleep between the intersections and the architectural elements of the Casa del Fascio in Como, designed by Giuseppe Terragni—one of the most important modernist architecture. -
I AM THE DAUGHTER OF DEAD-FATHERS
Miriam Sampaio 10 mins (UK, 2018)
Sampaio shows in detail the vestiges of the Lisbon detention centre of Portugal’s former state police, PIDE, just before it was renovated and converted into luxury apartments, where anti-fascists were interrogated and tortured and where she suspects her own father was held in the 1960s. -
DELETION
Esther Urlus 12 mins (NL, 2017)
Does your view of an image change when you know something horrific or disturbing took place in it? Even though you may not see (or recognize) anything? Is this “not seeing” essential to boost the imagination? -
EVIL.16 (TORTURE.MUSIK)
Tony Cokes 17 mins (US, 2019)
Animated excerpts from an article by Moustafa Bayoumi that was originally published in The Nation magazine on December 26, 2005. The article is a key and cogent text in a body of reportage and scholarship devoted to the military use of music and sound as a weapon, a form of psychological manipulation, or torture.