Encounters: Cinema and Contemporary Art – Ugo Nespolo

Over the course of his career, Ugo Nespolo has dabbled with different forms of audiovisual imaginary, creating short films from the beginning of the neo-avant-garde season of the 1960s.

On Saturday, March 26 at 3.00 pm at the Capitol Cinema, the artist will retrace over forty years of research and experimentation through a selection of video works that have marked his career. Complemented by a talk with art critic and scholar Bruno Di Marino, the event will be translated into LIS – Italian Sign Language.

Free admission

Ugo Nespolo (Mosso – BI, 1941)

He graduated from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and, subsequently, in Modern Literature. In 1967 he became a pioneer of Italian Experimental Cinema following his meeting with Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Andy Warhol, Yōko Ono, in the wake of New American Cinema. Together with Mario Schifano, Nespolo devoted himself to avant-garde cinema and, between 1967 and 1968, made numerous films starring his friends and colleagues Enrico Baj, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lucio Fontana. His films have been screened and discussed in museums and festivals such as the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the Venice Biennale.

The notion of art and life (which is also the title of a book published by the artist in 1998) is the basis of Nespolo’s expressiveness and is a legacy of the Futurist Movement: “Manifesto for the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” (1915). The manifesto was also the source of his interest in design, applied art and creative experimentation in various fields such as advertising graphics, illustration, clothing, sets and costumes for operas. His research also includes multiple forms of material. He works on various supports and with different techniques: wood, metal, glass, ceramic, fabric, alabaster.

Bruno Di Marino (Salerno, 1966)

A scholar and art critic, his field of research is the moving image, specializing mainly in audiovisual experimentation, new media and the relationship between cinema and other artistic fields (visual arts, design, architecture, photography, music).

He founded the audiovisual archive of the Laboratory Museum of Contemporary Art of the “La Sapienza” University of Rome, which he curated until 2001.

For several years he was an editorial consultant for Rarovideo, for which he curated a few dozen publications on DVD; for the same distribution company, he also curates the “Interferenze” series, with DVDs dedicated to films by Rybczynski, Warhol, Jarman, Gioli, Viola, Svankmajer, Nespolo and many others.

He is a contributor to the “Segnocinema” magazine and the newspaper “Il Manifesto”, for whose cultural supplement “Alias” he writes the “Tube Attack” column.