Articles by: Natasha Lardera

Last on view in the United States during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Giacomo Balla's Penetrazioni dinamiche d'automobile (1912-13), the iconic work of art plays a fundamental role in Balla's dynamic contribution to Futurist aesthetics, was presented, for a day only, at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo (NYU). The piece will be up for grabs on November 5 at Christie's.

“We are in front of a painting that celebrates speed and the last time a group of people like us  stood in front of it was 98 years ago,” Nicola Lucchi doctoral student in the Italian department at NYU said at the presentation, “Our predecessors were looking at this Balla at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco: when searching for contemporary Italian art, the expo's visitors were directed two different ways - the official Italian pavilion  which was filled with very academic paintings that were typically Italian as per their artificiality.

The second possibility was to walk further to a gallery annex and experience what unofficial Italy had to offer. That was the first exhibition of futuristic art in the United States.”

Balla's drawing was in a position of regard, either the first or last to see in the room.

“Tonight we have the privilege of re engaging in a dialogue interrupted almost a century ago,” Lucchi continued, “This is an important Balla, its dimensions alone prove that the painter considered it more than just a simple study.

Its value was also recognized by Umberto Boccioni, at the time the was most influential amongst futuristic painters, and he reproduced it in this fundamental book “Pittura e Scultura Futuriste” also here tonight thanks to Christie's.”

Art scholars and enthusiasts were left speechless by the stunning and complex artwork also reproduced in the small book, but with a difference: a dedication.

“The painting represents one of the first compositions in which Balla explored the theme of velocità meccanica, which signifies the second stage in his study of the pictorial exploration of movement (the first being dedicated to movimento organico),” Paolo Baldacci and Flavio Fergonzi wrote in a critical and historic essay reproduced by Christie's, “Disgregazione x velocità, Penetrazioni dinamiche d'automobile, which is among the most representative and recorded on the subject, was untraceable for over seventy years, and has recently re-emerged in an American collection, whose owner purchased it in Italy in the 1950s. The work was originally undated and was only signed 'BALLA' (lower left), as shown in the image published by Umberto Boccioni in 1914.

At an unspecified date, probably towards the end of the 1930s, Balla likely gifted Disgregazione x velocità, Penetrazioni dinamiche d'automobile to a friend named Pelliccia, then adding, in a new medium, an additional inscription to the signature 'BALLA: FUTURISTA 1912 PER PELLICCIA.' It has been, and still is, quite hard to identify Pelliccia. The most reasonable argument allows us to believe it could be the well-known violinist Arrigo Pelliccia (Viareggio 1912-Rome 1987). In fact, Balla himself used to be an amateur violin player, and one of his most important paintings is La mano del violinista (The Hand of the Violinist), 1912 (London, Estorick Collection); it seems therefore likely that Arrigo Pelliccia, who was already famous at the end of the 1930s, met with Balla and was given the present work from him as a tribute.”

“The fact that this is a drawing does not detract from its importance on the contrary Balla's refusal to engage with paint embellishments, with the exception of some functional chiaro scuro, demonstrates his desire to abandon an impressionistic and the figurative style in favor of a more conceptual one,” Lucchi concluded, “But what does this art work tell us? Why are we here looking at it instead of leaving it behind in a storage unit? This drawing is a testament to an era.”

Balla and the Futurists aimed at depicting movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the twentieth century. “Through Futurism Balla celebrated the machine and his early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing figures and objects in motion.”

Looking at Penetrazioni dinamiche d'automobile  we can see an autombile and a driver, we see wheels deformed by speed and clouds of dust. Indeed the drawing portrays a car in motion, it captures movement, sound and light in their shifting dynamisms. The result is a vortex of lines, acute angles and spirals. It is quite abstract in its effect yet it represents the strong impetus and unique innovations of Balla's art which determined the Futuristic movement's influence on art .

The Wildlife Conservation Film Festival is starting on October 16th and one of the featured filmmakers is the Italian Giuseppe Bucciarelli.

WCFF brings together activists, experts filmmakers, non-governmental enthusiasts, representatives of the public and private sector, youth, scholars as well as wide audiences from all walks of life. The festival promotes programs and projects that contribute to the protection of biodiversity and sustainability. It is the perfect venue to showcase Bucciarelli's work.

Giuseppe is first and foremost an accomplished biologist with fifteen years of academic research experience from ecology to molecular biology to genome evolution who has been working in universities in Italy and the USA.
 

He began his film making career on a sailing trip down the Mediterranean from Syria to Lebanon to Israel to North Africa. The trip inspired the film, “Ahmed and the Return of the Arab Phoenix” (which will be shown at the festival). Ever since then, he has been making films, documenting the wildlife of Africa.
 

Over the years, his films were broadcasted and distributed throughout the US, Italy and the Middle East. They have been featured on PBS and the National Geographic Channel. Since 2009, Giuseppe has taken his scientific expertise to Kenya to start working as an independent filmmaker. He collaborates with several conservation organizations and wildlife experts to make films about endangered African ecosystems. He is also involved with local communities, helping them to solve human-wildlife conflicts.
 

He is the founder and director of Terra Conservation Films  full-service production company specialized in working with non-profit organizations and nature enterprises to make documentaries, promotional videos and stills focusing on the conservation of the natural world and the interaction between people and the environment.

The festival welcomes 4 of his films that will be screened on October 16 at 6 pm:

Laikipia, the Land of Life
There is a place in Africa where rivers, forests and savannas play a never-ending game with people. This place is Laikipia, central Kenya. Here dangerous wildlife share the land with thousands of farmers and their livestock. A perfect combination for trouble... But despite all odds the people living in Laikipia are fighting to make a dream come true.

Ahmed and the Return of the Arab Phoenix.
This is the story of a handful of visionary men who are fighting in the desert to protect what is left of the biodiversity of the Syrian steppe stretching from the Iraqi border to almost the Mediterranean coast. Their efforts will be rewarded by the discovery of the last middle eastern breeding colony of the Bald Ibis in the wild, one of the rarest migratory birds and a symbol of wisdom for the Bedouins of the desert.

Spotter Come Home
A 7 minute feature of a five year-old male Black Rhino who have wondered into the land of poachers and must find his way back to Lewa Downs conservancy.

Walking with Baboons

They are short, hairy and funny looking. They are also astute, strong and well organized. They are baboons. Widespread all over Kenya , these monkeys are often considered pests. But a day spent walking alongside a troop of wild baboons in the Rift valley will change our mind.

“My stories need to have some emotional impact,” Giuseppe told i-Italy when asked what kind of stories he in interested in portraying, “Even if they are local stories they need to represent issues of environmental conservancy that are universal.”

What brought you to make documentaries?

After working for several years at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples, I took a long trip on a sail boat. It lasted 5 years and it took me to all corners of the Mediterranean. I arrived in Syria and I met an Italian, Gianluca Serra, who then worked for FAO. He had just found out, by collaborating with the local Bedouin population, we could witness the last middle eastern breeding colony of the Bald Ibis. I was in the right place at the right time. I had a small video camera with me and although I had no film making experience I really wanted to tell this story with some images. I just wanted to show what as an audience member I would want to see... although I did not really know how to accomplish that. Two years later Ahmed and the Return of the Arab Phoenix was born and broadcasted on National Geographic Italia. It has won 6 international awards.
 

Giuseppe owes a lot to that first film of his, which he calls one of his favorites, although he made it with much inexperience, balanced by a consuming passion for his work.

And even today his passion brings him to shoot stories he loves that oftentimes are accompanied by crazy incidents. “A year ago, while shooting Laikipia, the Land of Life, I fell off the sky on a plane as a diving chicken, I was charged by elephants and rhinos and I had a totally absurd incident... I fell on my camera consequently I broke an artery and lost 4 liters of blood...it was a real blast!”

Now in Giuseppe's future there is a new film on food politics to be shot in November in Yemen.

Meanwhile on the 16th he will be in New York to present his films at the WCFF.

Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to meet like-minded conservationists and to be intellectually stimulated by discussions on issues that concerns us all. The film screenings and panel discussions will take place at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium. 

There are some exhibitions that have no reason whatsoever to be missed: Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema, on view from September 28, 2013, through February 9, 2014 at MoMA is one of them.

This is the first time the Museum of Modern Art dedicates such a grand show to a set designer, an Italian one nevertheless. “I'm very happy to be here,” Dante Ferretti told i-Italy, “mostly because it was unexpected. I came to visit MoMA several times, to see different shows and never did I expect they would show my work while I am still alive,” he joked. “I was helped a lot by Antonio Monda and Marina Sagona, they were my curators who then introduced me to MoMA's curators  Ron Magliozzi, Associate Curator, and Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. It took about 5 to 6 years to get to where we are today. Usually a show lasts from 5 to 6 months, so there are other artists and their work in front of you and you have to wait around... but anyways here I am.”

And “here” is a dark room divided into a maze of moving images, mute films projected on paper-thin screens... films by celebrated directors such as Federico Fellini, Franco Zefferelli, Ettore Scola, Dino Risi, Marco Bellocchio Tim Burton, Brian DePalma, Terry Gilliam, Julie Taymor and Martin Scorsese.

“The idea was mine,” Ferretti announced, “In Rome, back in 2010, I curated, together with my wife Francesca Lo Schiavo, a show on Fellini called Labirinto Fellini @ the fifth Rome International Film Festival. It was a collection of 10 enormous installations, over 200 photographs, 50 drawings, 30 audio-video stations, 12 video projections on floating screens, documents, movie posters and slide shows. I wanted to do something similar here, for my work. There is a small part of my work, because if I had to bring it all I would fill the entire museum! Fellini's maze of screens and mine are different because we kept the sound of the films that we projected. Here there is no sound. The room is attached to MoMA's movie theater and the sound would disrupt the movie going experience.”

Antonio Monda, one of the curators, informed us of how this idea was what really captured the attention of MoMA, along with the opportunity to showcase the majestic chandeliers from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), the massive, illuminated clock from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), as well as the golden, winged lions created for the Venice Film Festival.

“Walking through this maze is like traveling back in time,” Ferretti added, “I was just looking at the images of one of the first films I ever worked on here in New York, Ciao Maschio (1978) by Ferreri.”

New York and its studios, as well Los Angeles, London and Toronto, have basically become Ferretti's adoptive homes. “I go where cinema takes me,” he affirmed, “I go where a director asks me to go.” And this has kept him away from his native Italy for years now. “In the last twenty years I worked only on two films in Italy, Titus and Gangs of New York. I do hope to go back  and work there for a while. I do miss it, it is my home.”

Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema is presented with a six-month retrospective of 22 films featuring the production designer’s career defining work titled  Dante Ferretti: Designing for the Big Screen. The film program, presented at The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, includes Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), and Federico Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (1986).

American kids in school are often asked to memorize The Raven, by the great writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Italian kids, instead, are asked to study A Silvia, a poem by one Italy's greatest, Giacomo Leopardi ((1798-1837). Italians consider him one of their greatest minds, but 19th-century poet and philosopher remains somewhat unknown abroad.

After seven years of toil involving a team of translators in three different countries, a collection of the writer's ideas, observations and thoughts, written over the course of 15 years, Zibaldone, that was published in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, decades after its author's premature death, has finally been put, for the first time in its entirety, into English.

Zibaldone amasses the unprecedented brilliance of Giacomo Leopardi  into one groundbreaking, 2,500-page text. Widely regarded as Italy’s finest modern lyric poet, Leopardi spent years cultivating and refining his radical and incisive analyses of religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, translation, the natural sciences, literature, poetry, and love in his Zibaldone.
  
  

To commemorate this extraordinary, epochal publication, a panel of experts and admirers gathered at the Italian Academy, Columbia University, to read selections and represent the different voices of Leopardi in Zibaldone on stage, including Jonathan Galassi (President and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Michael Caesar (Emeritus Professor of Italian Studies, University of Birmingham), Franco D’Intino (Director of the Leopardi Center, University of Birmingham), Ann Goldstein (translator and editor at The New Yorker), Joseph Luzzi (Professor of Italian, Bard), Paul Muldoon (Poetry Editor, The New Yorker; winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Adam Kirsch (poet and literary critic), Lee Froehlich (Managing Editor of Playboy), Dorothea Lasky (poet and Professor of Writing, Columbia), Nicola Gardini (novelist and Lecturer in Italian Studies, Oxford), Susan Bernofsky (Professor of Writing, Columbia and Director of LTAC) and Paolo Valesio (poet and Emeritus Professor, Italian, Columbia).

The celebration began with an introduction by David Freedberg, Director of the Italian Academy. "Zibaldone", by Giacomo Leopardi was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino; translated from the Italian by Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, Martin Thom, Pamela Williams and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

"It has been very, very challenging because it's a very long text – huge, full of quotations in      Greek Latin, French, Spanish, English,” said co-editor Franco D'Intino.
“Prolific writer, translator, and thinker Giacomo Leopardi was born in the small provincial town of Recanati, during a time of political upheaval and unrest in Europe created by the French Revolution. Although his aristocratic family was affected by the instability of the region, Leopardi was tutored extensively under private priests from an early age, showing a remarkable talent and thirst for knowledge. As a sickly adolescent who was often confined to the household, Leopardi spent most of his time in his father’s extraordinary library, immersing himself in classical and philological knowledge.

Within years of independent study, Leopardi became fluent in reading and writing Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, while he began translating various classical texts including Horace and Homer. At the age of fourteen he wrote Pompeo in Egitto (Pompey in Egypt) an anti-Caesarean manifesto, and went onto writing various philological works until 1816, which marked a turning point in Leopardi’s life which he called “the passage from erudition to the beautiful.”

Leopardi wrote L'appressamento della morte (The Approach of Death), a poem in terza rima which was heavily influenced by Petrarch and Dante, as well as Inno a Nettuno (Hymn to Neptune), and Le rimembranze(Memories). After this, Leopardi abandoned other types of work and concentrated on lyric poetry, including his book Canti (Songs) and Canzoniere (Songbook), as well as many more. Leopardi frequently focuses on the patriotic, idyllic scenes, unrequited love, childhood, and classical themes and references.”
(www.poetryfoundation.org)

There definitely is something heroic about the English publication of Zibaldone: this  landmark publication is a real gift from the nineteenth century  of pure literature, dark melancholy, insightful philosophy and pure emotion.