"A False Luke" - opening performances

Emilio Fantin, Giancarlo Norese and Cesare Pertoiusti opened "A Falsu Luke" - a collaborative project curated by Luigi Negro. The show consists of the video documentation of their
original peformance "Lu Cafausu" which took place last year in San Cesario Southern Italy, as well as 3 performances by the artists which happened (and were documented) in vertexList.

Cesare Petroiusti handing out an edition of 500 drawings made with coffee and sugar.


Giancarlo Norese brewing the best coffee I've ever had. The monitor on the bottom shelf plays a video of Giancarlo dressed as Superman, crying .

Emilio Fantin ironing old, stained clothes he brought from Italy.


The ironed clothes were displayed on a gallery wall.

Visitors watching the Lu Cafausu video. Front of the gallery is set up like a
sitting room.

Jillian Mcdonald Performance artMovingProjects

During the opening people were asked for their names for a lottery.
The lucky winner.

Jillian Mcdonald and Carlo Zanni at artMovingProjects

We invite you to aMP artMovingProjects

166 N. 12th St, between Bedford and Berry Sts., Williamsburg (917-301-6680, 917-301-0306). Subway: L to Bedford Ave. Thu- Sun, 1pm - 6 pm www.artmovingprojects.com info@artmovingprojects.com

Jillian Mcdonald

January 27th 7-9pm through March 18th Opening Night Performance 8pm

Zombie Loop
2-channel video, 2006

My new body of work, Horror Cycle concentrates on the manufacturing of fear as entertainment that the horror film genre accomplishes. Unlike contemporary horror films, this work offers no extreme violence, little gore, no character development, and zero plot. These are stripped away in order to highlight the protagonists and their dilemmas.

The zombie, among other "undead" monsters, is the definitive horror creature thanks to its abject existence - robbed of identity, neither fully dead nor fully alive, neither clever nor resourceful, and driven only by its hunger for flesh. The central dilemma of the sub-genre of zombie films is that the survivor must outrun and therefore outlive the zombie. Victims turn into zombies, therefore to be caught and find oneself zombified is the most horrifying resolution. The sub-genre plots survivors on the move and ever vigilant, or temporarily holed-up and sleeping with one eye open. It is impossibly difficult to escape zombies, despite the fact that with little exception they move agonizingly slowly. Although it should be easy to escape them, the earliest victims are those paralyzed by their own fear.

Zombie Loop is a two-channel video in which projections on two opposing walls position the viewer in the center of a visual loop, wherein a gruesome zombie endlessly pursues a running survivor. On screen, I "play" both zombie and survivor. The video tracks are the same length. The zombie, prepared with professional make-up and filmed from the front stumbles, expressionless but threatening, towards its goal of catching the survivor. The survivor runs, occasionally glancing over her shoulder and exclaiming in fear as she becomes aware of the imminent danger. In the scenarios, filmed on a country road in Avoca, Wisconsin, it is obvious that the zombie and the survivor are somehow the same, referencing the genre's implied life-cycle where the living become the undead and the undead want only to consume the living. The tracks are projected simultaneously and the sequences looped continuously.

Locating the viewers physically between the two roles positions them as both the pursued just out of reach of danger, and the pursuer hungering for its prey.

http://www.jillianmcdonald.net/projects/zombieloop.html

http://www.jillianmcdonald.net






Project Space
Carlo Zanni
http://www.zanni.org
http://www.zanni.org/average/

Inspired by the graphics of Leisure-Suit-Larry (1987), AVERAGE SHOVELER (2004-05 Rhizome.org at The New Museum commission) is an online game challenging the boundaries between photo, paintings and short movie. The location is the NYC’s East Village. It’s snowing, and you have to keep your way cleaned. Each flake of snow contains an image taken live from Yahoo’s news feed while people tell you top stories in cartoon bubble gathered from the same sources. All this is set to music composed by Gabriel Yared, award-winning composer of scores for movies such as The English Patient and Cold Mountain.

Freeze writing on Average Shoveler by Marco Antonini

http://www.artmovingprojects.com/Freeze.html/

Lu Cafausu: episodes 2&3

False Luke - episode 2
THE SECRET OF CATHERINE


The Cafausu will seem useless, the villa it belongs to will vanish in the contortions of the complex, chaotic logic of real estate speculation. In a few decades we’ll be in the suburbs and none of the people who live in the rows of condos will remember the villa.The plots of the peasants of the Arneo, after years of suffering and squatting, have been sorted out thanks to a series of government concessions. The land no longer belongs to the English family. They had already abandoned it anyway, years ago. I know the secret of Catherine, the daughter of the owners of the villa. She fell in love with Uccio, a youth “dark of skin and hair”, from a humble family, proud leader of struggling workers and, by the way, the father of yours truly. They would meet, in secret, at the gazebo, a romantic, fragrant place, near the wall of the estate. Catherine died very young, a few months after giving me birth. But before dying she made Uccio, who had become the designated owner of the land, promise that even if he had to demolish the crumbling villa, even if he had to sell everything, he would never let the gazebo, the place of their lovemaking, be destroyed.
***

False Luke - episode 3

THE VIGIL


Maria Concetta is 65 years old. She’s a dressmaker. We’re shut away in a room and she’s washing me with care, using a sponge soaked in water and vinegar. As she washes me, my friend… I see the Cafausu, the sun, the linen curtains shifting in the early summer breeze. Outside, all around, there are grapevines and, above all, olive trees. She stops washing and shows me an old photograph stuck on the mirror over the dresser. She says it’s the first picture that was ever taken in the villa. Catherine was a little girl, she’s running, out of focus; some women are standing around her, they stop and look rather bashfully towards the photographer. In the gazebo you can sense the presence of someone who’s about to serve coffee. The women, all quite tall, have very short, very light dresses, floral prints (pastel colors, I would guess). They are all barefoot. Maria Concetta points to one, the chubbiest, wearing schoolmarm spectacles. «This one was my friend ? she says ? Valentina Scorrano was her name, she came from Presicce, but then she went to Germany.» In the background, away from the others, a very young, skinny girl looks sad, struggling with the breeze as it tries to raise her skirt. «Little one got no panties, would’ja say?» Maria Concetta chuckles, enjoying her vulgar joke, her smile revealing gold teeth. She’s a chiangimuerti (a paid mourner), and they say she got rich fixing up the corpses. In the emotional atmosphere of a wake jewelry has a way of getting lost, especially when the vigil is conducted by a chiangimuerti, closed up with you in a room.

Screening at Wexner Center

"8 BIT" made it to Columbus Ohio ... Here we are at Wexner Center! The event/series Avant Gaming was curated by Chris Stults and beside yours truly consisted of Cory Arcangel's talk + Mario Movie.. As you can see we had fun. About 100 people showed up, the Q&A was great and we celebrated at the local OSU dive "Larry's"
Columbus Dispatch wrote a little preview of the show.

Chris Stults introducing 8 BIT

Answering student's questions after the screening (some actually stayed this time!)
All photo's by Scot Kaplan (thanks Scot!)

Lu Cafausu - episode 1

EFREM

A while ago, before the summer, in the courtyard at Careof in Milan, Efrem, a guy with a beard told me he came from San Cesario: «I live on the edge of town, at lluca fausu», he said, with that sly Salento accent. I thought: «He lives in a false Luca, at Luca-the-fake… whatever.» Over the next few days, for no apparent reason, I kept thinking about this fake Luca. A couple of months later we were driving through San Cesario, Alessandra had a blue wig, it was three in the morning and we were on our way home from a party. We had ingested red wine, rum and chinotto, and I had chewed some mint leaves. «I want to show you something – she said. Have you ever heard of the lu cafausu?» I couldn’t believe my ears. Around two bends and down two one-way streets (the wrong way, she was driving) and there was the fake Luca. A dozen buildings surround what might almost be called a piazza. At its center stands a strange structure (more of an “object”) in crumbly masonry, a weird sort of pagoda with a Middle Eastern air (a crescent moon on the roof), fragile, almost an eyesore. Efrem’s neighborhood doesn’t take its name from some dishonest Luca, but from a “coffee house” (twisted by local dialect into “lu cafe-haus-u”) that has been many little things for many long decades: a gathering place for peasants, a gazebo that provided shade for noblemen and English officers as they sipped tea, a dwelling for a young orphan and his white horse, a henhouse, a toilet, a garage for a Lambretta, a sexual trysting place, a farmer’s tool shed, an illegal gambling joint, a dream object and, last but not least, the site of performances by four artists. It was and is an inadmissible spot, a territory of accumulation and absence of meaning. A metaphor, perhaps, of what we might become.


We are pleased to announce the opening of

a False Luke (Lu Cafausu), a collaborative project by artists Emilio
Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese and Cesare Pietroiusti. January
26 (7-10 pm) – March 04, 2007

vertexList

Pleasant Uncertainty

Morgellons at Fleisher-Ollman

(Philadelphia Weekly, 1/3/07) It’s Lee Arnold’s minor key soundtrack for his dreamy video projection S-Bahn that seems to have the last word. The thrumming audio washes over the entire gallery and colors the show in a kind of slow merry-go-round ambience that suggests life repeating itself, with very little learned along the way.

(Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/5/07) I did wonder where Lee Arnold shot his video, and assumed from its title, S-Bahn, that it was filmed from a train in Berlin. For a minute, I luxuriated in the pleasure of knowing. But I didn't know with certainty. It could have been any city.