Spike Island, a Bristol based international centre devoted to the development of contemporary art and design, hosts “Laws of attraction”, the first solo exhibition in the UK of Anna Franceschini (b. Pavia, 1979; living and working in Amsterdam and Milan), one of Italy’s most talented artists and filmmakers. Following her personal research path that focuses on cinema and exploits both analogue film and innovative techniques, Franceschini presents her work from the past five years to the UK public, including HD videos and silent and audio 16mm short films, some of them transferred to digital media and arranged in multi-channel projections.
Shooting places – workshops, factories, funfairs etc. –, objects, devices and methods of humans’ everyday life, the artist lingers on small details, isolating them from their contexts to bring out a new dignity and a unique poetic dimension. Anna Franceschini’s works are close ups of different worlds made of evidences of people’s existence, but without their clear presence, shot to return fragments of the forgotten or hidden to the viewer. In “The player may not change his position” (2009) the artist films an almost deserted amusement park where carousels start working with round and hypnotic lights, sounds and movements. Parts of light up chairoplanes, bumper cars and roller coasters are depicted in a melancholic, still bewitched, place that reminds of “a rec room, which comes alive soon after the children go to sleep.” But the contexts never disappear completely and keep on reminding us of cinematographic trickeries that turn reality into something more suggestive as in “The Stuffed Shirt” (2012) where clothes of a dry-cleaning factory are pumped up with air that pushes them to the limit of explosion and give them the look of a machine-like puppet, recalling the myth of Golem. Continuously paying tribute to the history of filmmaking through a wisely use of substance and fiction, Anna Franceschini gifts us exercises in participant observation, hanging instants where the human being is both missing and leading.
The exhibition will run until December 14th 2014.
