Italian video art centers and archives: a treasure yet to discover.

Leuzzi, Laura

Abstract

Italy was a vibrant centre of video art production and exhibition, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This period was all the more remarkable because of the early date and the international reach of the work produced. Artists connected to the Italian video centres include well known names such as: M. Abramovic, V. Acconci, J. Baldessari, A. Boetti, C. Boltanski, D. Buren, G. De Dominicis, A. Kaprow, J. Kounellis, M. Merz, N. J. Paik, G. Paolini, F. Plessi, B. Viola and many more. This seminal experimentation laid the foundation for video art practice. However, it was only a few years ago that the history of early Italian video art was brought into the light, revealing the social, cultural, political and economic circumstances that characterized its rise and its fall into critical oblivion. REWINDItalia, a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), started from these premises. There is currently no public and central archive in Italy for videotape, so only a relatively small number of the tapes have been retrieved and have been made publicly available. In this paper, I examine the present circumstances of some of the most important historical Italian video archives, centres and artists' studios. These include ASAC in Venice (which contains art/tapes/22's videotapes), DOCVA in Milan, Centro Video Arte in Ferrara and MuEL in Varese. With this overview, the paper aims to present these unique case studies, and to demonstrate that seminal early Italian video production still retains scope for further exploration, stimulating interest from both a research and a curatorial point of view.

Citation

LEUZZI, L. 2015. Italian video art centers and archives: a treasure yet to discover. In Smite, R., Smits, R. and Manovich, L. (eds.) Data drift: archiving media and data art in the 21st century. Acoustic space, 14. Rīga: RIXC, pages 121-127 (108-114).

• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2015
• Deposit Date: Aug 29, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 16, 2024
• Publisher: Riga Centre for New Media Culture (RIXC)
• Pages: 121(108)-127(114)
• Series Title: Acoustic space
• Series Number: 14
• Series ISSN: 1407-2858
• Book Title: Data drift: archiving media and data art in the 21st century
• ISBN: 9789934843433
• Keywords: Video art; Italy
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1375003
• Additional Information: Pages according to table of contents are 121-127. Pages according to pagination on the chapter itself are 108-114.