Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

The watercolors at HangarBicocca by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, created in the 1980s, comment on daily life and travels and Armenian fables, as well as on seven video installations by the artist team also on view. While the watercolors are not exactly storyboards for the films, they offer a kaleidoscope of references that visually amplify individual frames. Mixing imaginative richness with an anthropological observation of reality, the watercolors share a narrative and poetic structure with the films, which reveal an anthropologist’s and amateur’s eye for the underprivileged and the colonized and which demonstrate that no framing is ever innocent. The two artists expose the historical power of the gaze that has enchained peoples and cultures throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and the role that camera techniques have played in the radicalization of their reality. In an emblematic scene from one of the films, Frammenti elettrici (Electric Fragments, 2002–2004), a bourgeois-looking woman adjusts a Roma child’s cap, as if she were preparing him to pose. Originating from an amateur home movie from the 1940s, when the Roma returned to Italy after the war, the found footage was shot on Lake Como—splendid and worldly, but also eerie in that it was the setting for Mussolini’s capture. In the woman’s gesture, and in its staging for the movie camera, the tragic nature of history seems to vanish. The show’s films present a dismissal of history, profiling the ruins of twentieth-century progress and science. Through archival images and powerful editing, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have created a sorrowful and epic fresco that speaks to loss of innocence.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.