As the afternoon sun dips behind the peaks, the first real chill begins to set in, the altitude and rarefied air make breathing laboured and coughing deep. The air is too cold to breathe directly.
I tie a sock around my face.
We are at base camp. The largest number of tents has given way to silence.
After yesterday’s avalanche, many have given up. There are only a few of us left.
Three four tents at most.
One has positioned himself at a distance. It seems he has lost his companion and wants to be alone.
I don't know if we will try climbing again. I don't know how long we will stay here. The days pass by watching the clouds and listening to the wind. Time seems to stand still. Food rations are scarce but for some reason the internet connection is great. An oxymoron of contemporaneity.
We have travelled the world, from the heart of Africa to the lungs of civilization,
from the slums of San José to the Babel's towers of Chinese ghost towns.
We have travelled through Russia as well as India, we have camped in humid and sticky jungles until we arrived here, at the foot of infinity, where worlds meet, where nationalities or personal histories cancel each other out, as in the middle of the sea, in the presence of these peaks we are only human beings.
Alterazioni Video
To know Alterazioni Video means to experience the inexhaustibility of surprise. They call them 'states of emergency': they are, for those who encounter them, perspective points rich in subterranean or exposed sensitivity. A sensitivity that emerges, gradually or suddenly, in their research, in their wandering through different places in the world - far away or around the corner - to seize opportunities that become filmic narratives, never ordinary and often subversive, because they open up unexpected visions, that subvert the given order and make us discover the hidden facets of reality; those that, upon closer inspection, are so shameless and cumbersome, that perhaps we voluntarily choose not to notice, not to consider.
From this encounter, disjointed, contradictory, discontinuous, and without rhythm, Himalaya was born. Before that, however, this work was born from the idea of offering the collective and its members, scattered in different corners of the world, a space of residence and production within Mattatoio.
During the first onsite visit with one of them, after several online meetings, we showed the different spaces that we would have liked the group to inhabit during the ten days of residency, to create a film, a performance, or whatever they could have imagined for Mattatoio, using indoor and outdoor spaces.
At some point, we arrived under the Pelanda's canopy that borders the large open space of Campo Boario. Some people live under the canopy, camped out in tents or on cots, varying in numbers according to the seasons or the dynamics of coexistence – that are not always easy or peaceful. Some stay there for a long time while others appear and disappear within a few weeks. The tents vary from two to five and, now and then, they disappear only to appear again, like the smell of burnt carried by smoke triggering anxieties about possible fires in the theatres' equipment, and that always reveals itself as the more subtle smell of grilled meat.
"We have a problem, choosing to do a performance here means figuring out what to do with the people who live here," I say looking around.
"This is not a problem, it is an opportunity." Paolo Luca immediately replies, as he sends images of the canopy to all the other members of the group who are not with us.
From this occasion, from this vision, Himalaya was born, and the installation that accompanies the days of work that followed with Anepa and Filippo, under the canopy in which they live, and the various people involved in the work or who pass by and stop to observe and participate in our adventure.
The collective wanders around Rome in search of the different 'Himalayas', hidden in the streets, flyovers, parks and squares, behind the numerous tents that, if we pay attention, appear and disappear over the horizon of our gaze, under the scorching sun that gives these survival camp-bases the strange sense of a mirage.
Himalaya is Rome in every corner, it is the place of risk and discovery, of the climb towards the impossible, it is the territory that cannot be conquered because it always escapes and shows new perspectives, where the human being must give way to the unexpected.
Himalaya is also a film, a Turbofilm, which mixes the real and the imaginary in a journey made under emergency conditions. But Himalaya is above all about knowing how to notice what surrounds us with an ironic, open, inclusive and non-invasive gaze, neither naive nor dogmatic. A gaze that 'asks permission', with complicit sensitivity, thus making 'the camp' a common place to meet, instead of a place to hide, to dismiss.
This is what we think should happen in a space that deals with culture and experimentation, in this mobile community open to research and creativity.
To leave space, these spaces, to the artistic visions and sensibilities of a collective like Alterazioni Video, where every single member creates, films, edits, and composes music in the function of a common perspective that is created day by day, amidst contrasts, complicities, failures and collaborations with professionals and people encountered in daily excursions.
The common perspective this time inhabits the Mattatoio and makes everyone part of a new adventure, whatever the outcome, for whoever wants to go through it, aware of being a spectator of something that is more than a film, an installation or an exhibition: it is a "turbo" experience at the limits of the "safe" world, at the exact point where the boundaries break down until they no longer exist.
The canopy is now the base camp of moments of work, of breaks in the shade, of time measured by those who live there. There, Anepa, washing her hair in her basin, looks up at the large image of the mountains, turns around, smiles amusedly and says: 'Tonight I will be cold'.
Ilaria Mancia
Theatre 1
“Himalaya - The film” (2022)
film
35'/HD
Rome
An unreleased film created as a process, shot, edited and produced during Alterazioni Video's stay at La Pelanda. The set is the Mattatoio and various locations in Rome attended by actors and actresses selected during the Casting Party and characters discovered during explorations and adventures in the city. The turbo film Himalaya reveals the places of the Mattatoio and transforms its physiognomy and architecture into an imaginative elsewhere. Some of the scenes filmed live during the screening of the film on the evening of 30 June will be part of the new work, visible in the theatre where it was created.
Foyer 1
The screen crashed and we put Turbofilm on the shirts (2022)
Site-specific installation consisting of wooden structure, coloured paint, blueback paper print, digitally printed viscose shirts, clotheslines, bamboo.
Turbofilms change format, adapt to the context, mutate, like primitive amoebas. In this installation they become Hawaiian shirts, declining on the fabric like a timeline. The films reproduced are: All my friends are dead, FReD, Berlin, 2012, Numbers are not called in numerical order, Artists' Serial Killer, Ambaradan, Blind Barber, Black Rain, Unfinished, Surfing with Satoshi.
Before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Alterazioni Video, was organising the second expedition to Russia to meet Professor Zimov (the man who is trying to repopulate Siberia with Mammoths) and continue the film War and Peace. The outbreak of war and the impossibility of returning to Russia left only a trace of a film that can no longer exist. A two-dimensional dacha is what remains from that experience nipped in the bud. The set design of a scene that will never be filmed.
Galleria delle Vasche
War and Peace (2019)
film
30'/col. /HD
Russia
The film contains explicit images that may offend sensibilities.
Viewing by minors is not recommended.
Full-length screening of the film shot in Russia in 2019 that questions the aesthetics of fake news and the creative processes at the service of post-truth.
Russian police car (2022)
Sculpture in wood and blueback paper
Foyer 2
All My Friends Are Dead (2009)
musical - horror - mocu - fiction - movie
60'/col. /HD
Bandjoun / Cameroon
Screening of the collective's first Turbofilm, shot in Cameroon and set in Bandjoun, in the "Transylvania of Africa" and inspired by the practice and work of Jean Rouch.
Princesse sur la sardine (2010)
Foam mattresses with digital prints on fabric.
Installation consisting of mattresses covered in African textiles, inspired by characters and scenes from the film All My Friends Are Dead. The audience can use the mattresses to rest and to follow the projection of the film.
Outdoor
Himalaya - The Installation (2022)
Print on blueback paper
A site-specific installation that transforms the outdoor context of La Pelanda into an alienating location and set for the new Turbofilm: Himalaya, filmed in the spaces of the Mattatoio and the city of Rome.
Alterazioni Video is an artistic collective founded in 2004 and composed of Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu and Giacomo Porfiri. They live between New York, Berlin, Palermo and the South Coast of Portugal.
Alterazioni Video are procedural artists who, by bringing together performance, video, installation, film and music, create states of emergency in which improvisation becomes a research engine.
For the production of their Turbofilms, often filmed in 'hot' areas of the planet, where tourism or safety nets are rarely encountered, the artists of Alterazioni Video detach themselves from the network by meeting physically on sets that are as improvised as they are improbable.
Turbofilms are a film genre (defined and analysed by the artists themselves in a PhD,) born in 2008 with Artists' serial killer, made by hacking the largest digital archive of art videos in Italy, and which can be defined as a meeting "between spaghetti westerns and YouTube neorealism. Often improvised and participatory, it recalls the beginnings of cinema while hiding in the folds of contemporary art."
In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the collective made The numbers are not called in numerical order, a film about the death of truths, shot live and edited remotely in real time by the collective during a large performance in the empty spaces of the Milan Triennale.
Their works include 2005's Waiting for the tsunami, where they were the first in art to make a web TV show predating the birth of social networks, The new circus event, for which Alterazioni Video rethought the concept of circus by scouting out 20 performers in the recesses of the web and materialising them in Venice, War and Peace, a Turbofilm shot in Russia in 2018 that investigates the aesthetics of fake news in today's Russia, and Incomplete. The Birth of a Style, with which the collective created the largest archive of unfinished public works on Italian territory.
www.alterazionivideo.com
@alterazionivideo