On Wednesday 24 May 2023, 6 pm, Fondazione Merz is delighted to invite you to the presentation of SNATURAMENTI, a workbook on displacement by the collective artist FLATFORM, active in the field of moving images with experiments that embrace both cinema and contemporary art. Curated by Giuliana Prucca, the book is published by AVARIE and Light Cone éditions, Paris.
This launch event in Turin takes place in the presence of the artists and is accompanied by the screening of their films. The discussion is moderated by independent curator Giuliana Prucca and Emmanuel Lefrant, filmmaker and Light Cone’s director.
SNATURAMENTI | FLATFORM
book presentation | film screening
fondazione merz | turin
via limone 24
10141 torino | italy
wednesday, may 24th 2023, 6 pm
presented by
flatform | giuliana prucca (AVARIE) | emmanuel lefrant (light cone)
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quantum | 2015
16:9, stereo, color, 8’07”
approaches to a theory of punctuation | 2019
16:9, stereo, color, 6’15”
blind song | 2018
unreleased, stereo, color, 8’04”
SNATURAMENTI | a workbook by FLATFORM on displacement
films, texts, drawings, sketchnotes flatform
creative direction, book concept, editing giuliana prucca
graphic design, art direction vito raimondi
publishers AVARIE + light cone éditions
The title SNATURAMENTI refers both to the object and the device of the book of Flatform, a Milan-Berlin based collective artist working on the border between contemporary art and cinema.
Transitional states of various types (spatial or temporal, geographical or historical, phenomenological or climatic) and the notion of landscape as a complex network of connections between human beings and other species form the base of their artistic and philosophical research practice. These questions become the very mechanism of deconstruction and reconstruction of Flatform’s films on the page, as operated by the author and curator Giuliana Prucca.
As in an artist’s workbook, drawings, texts, diary entries, layers, frames, alternative sequences, and installation renderings intersect with Flatform’s video productions in a poetic and non-mimetic exercise of their cinematographic techniques – such as compositing and audiovisual phase-shifting – in order to modify perceptive paradigms of time and space, transform the possible into the impossible – and vice versa, creating an unstable equilibrium between the foreseeable and the unexpected, between chance and control.
Having no cover, the book suggests that something begins – or ends – elsewhere, offscreen, thanks also to the gradually shifting book sections that mirror the circularity conveyed by the work of Flatform. The result is a configuration of four different and independent versions, which carry in them the latent possibility of being reunited.
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Founded in 2006 and based in Milan and Berlin, FLATFORM is a collective artist that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), MAXXI (Rome), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Fondazione Prada (Milan) and Garage Center for the Arts (Moscow).
AVARIE is a Paris-Berlin based independent publisher, founded in 2012 by Giuliana Prucca, specializing in contemporary art books and exploring the relationship between texts and images, body and space. With an authorial approach, an interest in the transversality of artistic disciplines and a focus on the quality of contents and materials, AVARIE considers the book to be a privileged space for research, creation and experimentation that arises from a close collaboration with the artist and the graphic designer, at the outskirts of commercial production. Since 2021, together with Labor Neunzehn in Berlin, AVARIE organizes and curates Kamera series, a screening program and exhibition of experimental films and printed matter.
LIGHT CONE is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1982, whose aim is the distribution, promotion and preservation of experimental cinema in France and around the world. It holds one of the major collections of experimental and avant-garde films in the world, consisting of around 6,200 films and videos dating from 1895 to the present day and made by 800 filmmakers. It organises regular screenings in Paris (SCRATCH) and since 2014, a residency program, Atelier 105, has been created for the digital post-production of experimental moving image works. Light Cone Éditions publishes a series of books on the history and aesthetics of experimental cinema.
photo credits © Louise Crawford | Stéphan Guéneau