Angela Marzullo
Homeschooling
Rome, Italy: NERO, 2016
232 pp., 12 x 20 cm., hardcover
Edition of 700
From March to June of 1975 (a few months before his brutal and still-unsolved murder), filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini published a number of articles under the umbrella title Gennariello. Written as a series of pedagogical letters from an old man to a young boy, the essays served as a criticism of contemporary Italy and of Italian youth. "The new generation is infinitely weaker, uglier, sadder, paler, more ill than all the preceding generations," wrote the director of Salo, who also aimed his vitriol at Christian Democrats ("corrupt, lazy incompetents") and the Communists, for their wholehearted acceptance of consumerism.
Concettina is a 2010 video work based on these letters, shot by Angela Marzullo in the parking lot of the Villa Borghese in Rome, starring her two daughters. Lucie and Stella are also the protagonists of Proletarian Theatre for Children (2006), where they skateboard around the Vieusseux estate in Geneva, and read texts by Walter Benjamin.
In other performative video works the young girls read from Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto and The Crisis of Culture by Hannah Arendt. Marzullo also directs her daughters in recreations of classic video works by other artists, such as Martha Rosler's seminal Semiotics of the Kitchen.
Released in late January of this year, Homeschooling looks at a decade of works by Marzullo, all involving her daughters and appropriation. Part monograph, part artist book, the volume repurposes text and dialogue from the films and also includes essays by Anna Cestelli Guidi and Francesco Ventrella.
Available from the publishers, for 15 Euros, here.
No comments:
Post a Comment