The practice of Milan-based duo Taroni-Cividin constitutes one of the most groundbreaking yet rarely traversed areas of the Italian experimental performance archive. Active between 1977 and 1984 – during which they produced over 30 performances and films both in Italy and internationally – the duo pushed at the edges of the live and the recorded, of cinematic, bodily and spatial practices, in interaction with visual and installation work and through a highly personal use of video and audio technologies, developing an approach to performance-making that continues to generate questions in some of the contemporary moment’s most pressing debates.
In this event, which celebrates a new monograph by Jennifer Malvezzi and Flora Pitrolo which for the first time comprehensively chronicles their practice and sets it into today’s context, artist Roberto Taroni and the book’s authors show and discuss material from the Taroni-Cividin archive. In particular, the discussion takes its cue from Taroni-Cividin’s performance Real Thing (1979) at Franklin Furnace, to investigate – in collaboration with the audience – the almost mythical importance that New York has taken on as city, scene and locus in contemporary histories of experimental work everywhere: but how did the traffic also move both ways between Europe and the US? How did the Italian scene figure in the NY récit at the time? How might the two histories complicate each other?
Video documentation of the May 9th, 2023, 3-4pm ET event of Milan-New York. Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video and Expanded Cinema 1977-1984. Recorded on Zoom, edited by Xinan Ran
Participant Bios
Taroni-Cividin began to work in 1977 with installation-performance projects, and in 1978 they were invited to the Second International Week of Performance in Bologna. Since then, and until the duo’s dissolution in 1984, they were amongst the most significant artists working across performance, video and expanded cinema. Their work was presented at the Symposium d’Art Performance in Lyon, Folkwang Museum in Essen, Koelnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, ICA in London, ICC in Antwerp, Franklin Furnace in New York, Watari Gallery in Tokyo and more. Website: www.taroni-cividin.org
Jennifer Malvezzi is a Researcher at the University of Parma, whose work focuses chiefly on the relationship between the moving image and other arts, particularly in video and experimental film. On these topics he has co-curated exhibitions and written numerous contributions for Italian and international journals and in edited volumes. She is the author of Remedi-Action. Dieci anni di videoteatro italiano (Postmedia Books, 2015) and curator with the Home Movies Archive of the “Art & Experimental Film” project, dedicated to the restoration and circulation of artist film in Italy. Website: https://unipr.academia.edu/JenniferMalvezzi
Flora Pitrolo is a scholar, translator and curator. Currently a Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, her work investigates the problems of the postmodern through experimental music and performance archives, mostly in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, from the 1900s to the present. Her most recent publication is the volume, co-edited with Marko Zubak, Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980: Disco Heterotopias (Palgrave 2022). She is the author of numerous publications on the Italian 1980s and works as a curator of cultural events in Italy, Great Britain, and the Balkans. Website: https://birkbeck.academia.edu/FloraPitrolo
Milan-New York, Taroni-Cividin is presented by FF LOFT and University of Udine – Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and supported by the Italian Council (2021), Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.
