Francesco Pedraglio: Scripting anticlockwise (6 constellations)

3 November – 20 December 2020

Developed from a live performance using theatrical staging and props, Francesco Pedraglio’s film imagines six possible constellations, each named after a compass, a wave, an owl, a phoenix, a peacock, in a darkened room. We follow the camera’s anticlockwise rotation around a central column to which performers attach a series of abstract images applied to window-like glass frames. These images materialise as lines, trajectories, colours, shapes and volumes, maybe fragments of an unknown alphabet, a silent and symbolic language. The actions are accompanied by a voice-over slowly describing, frame by frame, a sequence of filmed images involving a man, a chase, a spider monkey, using these same fragments to propose starting points for future stories.

Francesco Pedraglio (b. 1981, Italy) lives in Mexico City. Pedraglio is interested in storytelling as a tool to decode intimate encounters with both mundane and historically complex situations. The starting point of his practice, encompassing performance, sculpture, installations, prints, and film, is writing. A curious detail, an overheard rumour, a banal incident, anything could spark a narration. And it’s in the shift from written text to live action, from live action to staged installation or film that the exploration of language, fiction and reality-making occurs.

His work has been seen at Norma Mangione Gallery, Turin (2019); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2018); Museo Leonora Carrington, San Luis Potosí (2018); P///AKT, Amsterdam (2017); Kunstverein Munich (2017); CRAC Alsace (2017); Sheffield Fringe (2016); Parallel, Oaxaca (2015); The Physics Room, Christchurch (2015); Kunsthalle Wien (2015); ICA, London (2015). A collection of poems titled 99 Battle and 1 War (an extract) was published by Piano Nobile in 2016. His first novel A man in a room spray painting a fly was published by Book Works in 2014. Together with artist Tania Pérez Córdova, Pedraglio runs the publishing project Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing.

GAMeC (Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) was founded in 1991 in a renovated 15th century convent in Bergamo in northern Italy. With more than 1500 square meters of public space, the Gallery organises temporary exhibitions by major international figures and previously unseen projects by up and coming and local artists.

The Artists Film International 2020 programme responds to the theme of language. Local sounds, rituals and political realities feature, from the rhythms and images of a Bahamian Junkanoo to the contested ancestral lands on the desert border between Mexico and the USA.