Ultras Youth in Universo Giovane

Exhibitions
Dal 6 all’8 ottobre 2022 in occasione dell’evento ‘La Lombardia è dei giovani’, promosso da Regione Lombardia, il Museo presenta la mostra UNIVERSO GIOVANE
con fotografie di 10 importanti autori provenienti dalle collezioni: Giovanni Ambrosio, Antonio Biasiucci, Gabriele Basilico, Mario Cattaneo, Tomaso Clavarino, Rachele Maistrello, Claudio Majorana, Tommaso Mori, Claude Nori, Marco Signorini.
La rassegna, allestita al 39° piano di Palazzo Lombardia a Milano, esplora il complesso e sfuggente universo della condizione giovanile attraverso una selezione di oltre 60 opere originali dalla metà degli anni Sessanta, quando la questione giovanile emerge con forza nella società italiana, fino ai giorni più recenti. Scopri di più su www.mufoco.org
UNIVERSO GIOVANE
Fotografie dalle collezioni del Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea
6-8 ottobre 2022
Milano, Palazzo Lombardia – Belvedere 39° piano

Ius Soli in Casualité des mondes et de l’histoire

Publications

Some images from my long term documentary series Ius Soli are printed on the pages of Casualité des mondes et de l’histoire.

An article by researcher Luca Salza, in the book La destitution de la nature,  Éditions Mimésis.

Lire Lucrèce est une expérience vertigineuse : nous assistons à la guerre entre atomes qui voltigent dans l’espace infini, nous voyons se former des tourbillons et des ouragans, et ensuite des mondes, et puis les ruines de cette « nature » lorsque de nouveaux heurts se produisent. Luca Salza

Ultras Youth Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Exhibitions

Ultras Youth is now part of Mufoco collection.

A portfolio of 14 fine art prints by Fineart Lab Napoli has been delivered to the museum.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography had previously presented the group exhibition titled Who doesn’t jump up! Football, Culture. Identity, curated by Matteo Balduzzi, which is a reflection treating the game of football as an expression of both individual and group identity. An articulated exhibition project getting underway with the start of the European Football Championship and featuring Ultras Youth : Movimenti, densità, stratagemmi, posizioni: an installation  made of ink-jet prints and vinyl printing (about 40 photographs), two iPad showcasing digital pictures, stickers, one original ultras banner, one stencil, two videos, one audio footage and various ultras objects over two walls, two tables and the stained glass window at Museo Fotografia Contemporanea first floor. This site specific production  was  based on a translation of ultras supporters cultures into some documentary points of view: movements, density, archives, ploys, positions. And, of course inherently, youth. With the support of Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati.

 

Ultras Youth is part fo my documentary based photography works and I usually archive them under the label Argumenta (from Latin arguere, to prove), opening a wide range of ideas related to the uncertainty of depiction: archive as score, re-writing, readable/unreadable, fragments, representation as a temporary act, representation as a translation.

 

Ultras Youth Manifesto

  1. Since the willing to depict a phenomenon is just not enough, Ultras Youth is primarily a research based photography collection. The research project is led by historian Sébastien Louis, whose presence defines a stable investigation field, never under the pressure of personal or intimate needs to depict a phenomenon. The alliance of scientific research and aesthetic practices design a wider project whose goal is the understanding of a culture.
  2. Ultras Youth is a challenging work in terms of photography positions and in terms of ecology of images: which would be the right image able to investigate topics without putting a colonial and naif gaze ?
  3. Ultras Youth offers the opportunity to build up a small as well as a modest and temporary cartography, on the edge of classic iconography, of a youth movement constantly expanding from the Mediterranean area and mutating according to the countries and cities in which it establishes its roots.
  4. Ultras movement does not need any kind of monument, being itself a constant producer of monuments. But it might sometimes require the presence of photography as a tool to keep track of events and actions, in order to minimise the emotional waste due to ephemeral performances. 
  5. My main interest focuses on operations : aesthetic, ethic and political operations.
  6. Assuming that a movement finds its vis existendi in the effort released to be part of the movement itself, to observe the breaking points of orthodoxy is a leading criteria. I am mainly attracted by the ways in which Ultras go out of designed spaces (the curva and its masculine density is, by definition, Ultras primary space), when they put themselves in danger in regard to they own ideology, when they fall into contradiction during the identity definition process.
  7. Since the curva is the space assigned for ultras groups staged shows (usually defined by classic terms choreography and scenography), how can we define Ultras’ performativity? 
  8. Notes for a taxonomy of Ultras movement: movimenti, migrazioni, stratagemmi, posizioni, archivi. Michel de Certeau arts de faire: to walk, to collect, to show, to hide, to believe.

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions

Exhibitions

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions. Following Medea’s Visions and Oreste will be back, the Kulturscio’k Live Art Collective is bringing Sibyl Sessions to Parco Archeologico di Cuma, Festival Antro. The final work in a trilogy of contemporary, socially-commentating adaptations from Greek mythology, is a mixed media exploration of womanhood and time, mingling a romantic nostalgia for the past with dystopian omens for the future. More than performance, it incorporates film, photography, projections, and live music to create a distinctly unique aural and visual experience. Director and performer Alessia Siniscalchi orchestrates Sibyl Sessions with a team of talented artists, among them musician Phil St. George, visual artist Giovanni Ambrosio, and lighting designer Benjamin Sillon whose projector-helmet adds a new dimension of symbolic beauty to the piece. Radical technological inventions, exacerbated and extreme, become a pretext to tell the present, the past, and the future–the story of the oracle.

Giovanni Ambrosio features a four parts installation handled by Benjamin, the text based work Prophecies and pronouncements

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions

 

Questa è una rovina. Fateci caso.

Exhibitions

A public paper based artwork in Streetcart, a group show curated by O’vascio Room Gallery. From July 27th 2022 until natural destruction.

The site specific installation is based on an urban ruin in the city of Somma Vesuviana, in Campania, in the Vesuvio area: an old telephone booth pedestal. The work is an essay on the remains of a wired based past in our public space, in a society of connectivity. It has been built with loose papers, remaining from a past printmaking residency as well as ruins of essay prints from aquatint, which is itself a precess based on acid corruption of zinc plates.

The installation catalogue: Questa è una rovina. Fateci caso.

Corte II Vico San Michele 2022: the video

Videos

Ius Soli. Chapter one. Vesuvius black zone: waiting, passing, redemption: Corte II Vico San Michele.

The video trailer.

Video and editing by Maria Mazzella Music Lavami col fuoco by rumoremuto

Corte II Vico San Michele Dialoghi, rigenerazione, comunità, pietre, sfregamenti, catastrofi e archivi. A site specific installation of Ius Soli with invited artists. Campania Felix delenda est. Chapter 1: waiting, passing, redemption. The courtyard as a dialogue space. Promoted and produced by Vesuvio Adventures.

Thanks to artists rumoremuto Phil St. Georges Jone Kvie Alessia Siniscalchi Maria Mazzella Himali Singh Soin/David Soin Tappeser Julia Liedel Progetto Fiori Luca Salza

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions

Exhibitions, Residencies, talks, works in progress

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions by  Kulturscio’k live art collective at Museo della Moda di Napoli.

Open dress rehearsals Thu Jun 30th, Fri July 1st, Sun July 3rd 2022

Prophecies and pronouncements is a three chapters series of texts screened and played by performers inside Sibyl Sessions, third step of a trilogy on myths directed by Alessia Siniscalchi:
The distant memory of a red/green past imprinted with super 8 film and acridly sweet images from 1960’s Hollywood. A digital, Whatsapp present where human contact is still possible, where live stories proliferate over social networks. A completely virtual, dystopian future where we are prisoners of a technological helmet, self-obsession and individualism, disrupting everything we try to remember about ourselves.  
 
In first chapter, Out of date prophecies, I re-use and slightly re-write letters from CEOS and general marketing texts stating how important is, after George Floyd death, to promote human rights and to prevent injustice.
 
In the second chapter, following the flow of guru’s, handcrafted experts, theorists with any scientific culture which are now populating our connectivity based society, I offer mundane and non sibylline pronouncements: Killing kills.
 

The third chapter is a series of anxiolytic prophecies coming form my work Submit!, analysing the marketing literature aiming to intercept a huge reservoir of potential buyers: artists. They all want to emerge and they are ready to pay for any possibility to be seen by millions. A massive copywrited literature, sent by newsletters, constantly counts the time left before calls for proposal expire. A pressure on time shaped by countdowns and reductions for early birds. That is translated by a compulsive behavior for artists, filling forms, answering to calls, writing cover letters. Artists turns in chain workers as well as they are part of a market in which they can buy their possible marketing tools.

How do I archive?

Publications

How do I archive?
How do I archive a performance which is not mine in 
K. Revue trans-européenne de philosophie et arts 8 – 1/2022:
Medea and the laceration of Care / Medea: la lacerazione della cura

How do I archive a performance which is not mine? How do they perform an archive which is not theirs?What exactly is the subject of stage and theatre photography? What should it depict or archive? Why images are required? Working outside the limits of a discipline, it is thrilling to shift, in and with theatre photography, from the space designed to be the limited area in which a photographer can activate his point of view of a wider space without boundaries.

How do I archive a performance which is not mine?in Medea’s is an archive/installation/sculpture/performance. A photo archive from the long term creation process of Medea’s visions, directed by Alessia Siniscalchi, is engraved in blocks of printed papers/photographs bound with a plastic ribbon coming from an on-line low cost printer. The ribbon is fragile and can be easily broken.

Réaliser le portrait d’un sportif de haut niveau

Residencies, talks, works in progress

Réaliser le portrait d’un sportif de haut niveau : Dora Tchakounté.

An educational project for the Centre photographique de l’Ile-de-France/ Collège A. CAMUS du Pléssis Trévise, France. March-May 2022.

De février à mai 2022, les élèves de la 4ème 6 du collège Albert Camus, au Plessis-Trévise, ont créé avec l’artiste-photographe Giovanni Ambrosio. Ces ateliers – en lien avec les cours d’éducation physique, d’arts plastiques et d’espagnol – avaient pour but d’initier les élèves à la pratique du portrait, plus particulièrement du portrait en mouvement. Comment cadrer ? Comment éclairer ? Comment saisir ce qui bouge ? Quel point de vue adopter ? Doit-on mettre en scène ou au contraire saisir ce qui vient ? Dans un premier temps, les élèves ont expérimenté à partir d’exercices proposés par l’artiste. Puis ils ont photographié l’haltérophile française de haut niveau Dora Tchakounté. Mais iels ne l’ont pas photographiée de but en blanc : au préalable, iels l’avaient interrogée pour dresser son portrait chinois et apprendre ainsi à la connaître. Un portrait, c’est un ensemble de données, techniques, esthétiques, psychologiques, mais aussi – et peut être surtout – une rencontre, un rapport à quelqu’un. Les élèves ont également visité l’exposition La vie invisible au Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France de Pontault-Combault. Cette exposition collective rassemble les œuvres de 12 artistes portugaises qui travaillent pour la plupart avec leurs corps. La visite a permis aux élèves d’étoffer leur savoir au sujet du portrait photographique, mais aussi d’expérimenter en laboratoire des pratiques anténumériques. Une exposition des travaux réalisés a eu lieu dans le collège au mois de juin; Dora Tchakounté est venue la visiter. (Cpif)

Le portrait en mouvement avec Giovanni Ambrosio, en 2022. « Le portrait en mouvement » est un projet conçu et mis en œuvre par le CPIF et l’artiste Giovanni Ambrosio dans le cadre des classes à PAC, avec le soutien de la DAAC de Créteil. L’action est coordonnée par le service des publics du CPIF.

 

 

 

Documenting the ultras movement

Exhibitions, Residencies, talks, works in progress

Football fans, their behaviours, culture and history, have been the subject of analysis for decades. However, specific studies of the ultras movement, the youth culture that over the past fifty years has spread over the world, well beyond its origins in Italy, are relatively few.

Photographer Giovanni Ambrosio and filmmaker Ragnhild Ekner have both been involved in creating the exhibition Ultra at the Mediterranean Museum. They tell about and show examples from their ongoing work to document the ultras movement in different parts of the world. Together with you in the audience, we discuss what it means to photograph, film, and document a subculture such as the ultras movement? What problems arise, what considerations must be taken into account? And why is it important?

The Italian photographer and writer Giovanni Ambrosio has for many years worked with the historian Sèbastien Louis to document ultras groups in Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Director Ragnhild Ekner is currently working on the documentary film ULTRAS, about ultra groups in several countries around the world, which will premiere in the spring of 2024. The film is a co-production between Story, Film i Väst and SVT.

Moderator: Karl-Johan Cottman, Exhibition Producer at the National Museums of World Culture