What if expanded cinema would not only refer to cinema projection as a performative, physical object in the space, but to the exportation of the immaterial experience of a film outside the black box into the urban space or landscape?

The series "Enchanting Architecture Expanding Film" hosts reflections and discussions around the film experience as expanded out of the black box into the city and the landscape.

The series is curated by Giuseppe Di Salvatore (Filmexplorer) and Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich), and it is part of the research project "Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format", funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Nebula is the title of Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s most recent film, which echoes the original title of the Venice exhibition that hosts it at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and Alessandro Rabottini of the Fondazione In Between Art Film. While the exhibition’s aim is to bring film and architecture into dialogue, Andreotta Calò’s film explicitly displays the architecture of the Ospedaletto as the place where the film was shot and where it is exhibited. The former use of the architecture as a hospital, haunted by the history of the ill and deceased, is clearly visible as the camera focuses on the abandoned spaces of the Ospedaletto. They are experienced through the erring or exploring gaze of a solitary sheep.

Starting from Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s Nebula (2024), we embarked with a group of researchers, artists and curators from the exhibition space and on to a specific place in the landscape, the island of Sant’Andrea in the Venetian lagoon. The island with its architecture – a fortress built in the 16th century to protect the city of Venice – has become an object of speculation about its sustainable futures. Just recently, a global competition invited the submission of proposals to reinvent the site and its possible uses, taking into account the history and fragility of the lagoon’s ecosystem. What can the expansion of cinematic experience contribute to this speculation?

In a polyphonic text, Fabienne Liptay and Giuseppe Di Salvatore have curated the several inputs of the participants of the Venice event. The montage of statements is composed as a fragmentary jam session and intended to be a scenario for a rehearsal, a tool for inspiration and a starting point of an ongoing dialogue between film, architecture and landscape.

For the second event in the series "Enchanting Architecture: Expanding the film experience out of the black box", the curators Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich) and Giuseppe Di Salvatore (Filmexplorer) gather artists, curators and scholars from international and local communities for a public panel discussion conceived as a polyphonic talk on sirens as guardians of the waters, on the acoustic experience of the city and the landscape, and on the imagination of a sonic pluriverse in dialogue with film. The invited guests on the panel are Ruth Baettig, Elena Biserna, Alice Jasmine Crippa, Magali Dougoud, and Pauline Julier.

PANEL DISCUSSION | 2/10/2024 | 18:30-20:30
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Venice
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The public panel discussion will be held in English and Italian and will take place at Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi in collaboration with Pro Helvetia Venice. After the event, a written text documenting the talk will be published on Filmexplorer.