The exhibition Yuri Ancarani. The Roots of Violence presents for the first time the film trilogy San Siro (2014), San Vittore (2018), and San Giorgio (2019, shooting reel edit). This trilogy outlines an additional chapter in Yuri Ancarani’s research dedicated to places of socialization, of work, and of social control. The artist’s practice focuses on the interaction between human bodies, architecture, technology, and the resulting emotional relations of communities.
The work San Vittore won the second edition of the Italian Council (2017), a competition conceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP) – an organism of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, to promote Italian contemporary art in the world. San Vittore stems from the artist’s reflections on the condition of children whose parents are in prison. Ancarani came into contact with a non-profit association that has been working for years in Milan’s prison San Vittore to protect relationships between parents in jail and their children, safeguarding their rights. The film by Ancarani lingers on details of the complex world of children, focusing on those who each day enter and leave the prison. The film also describes the strict security measures minors are subject to once they enter San Vittore to visit their parent. The ways in which children’s imagination elaborates the prison world are narrated by the artist through drawings made by the minors themselves. In some of these, as if by eerie magic, the jail becomes a castle, inhabited by kings and queens.
San Vittore expands the research dedicated to iconic locations in Milan, the city where the artist has lived and worked for the past 25 years, already begun with another film on view, San Siro (2014). Set in the eponymous stadium, the film San Siro is an unexpected and powerful portrayal in which this famous place of leisure and amusement is presented as if it was a big machine that is constantly cared for by skilled technicians. The work is characterized by tension in crescendo, alluding to the energy that gradually grows during sports events.
At the center of the exhibition, a first and experimental version of San Giorgio (2019, shooting reel edit) is also presented. The work explores the idea of banking, institutions that have accompanied the history of our civilization since the Middle Ages and whose pervasiveness in our social system entails, at the same time, the notion of secrecy. The sequence of images leads visitors inside hidden places that guard enormous treasures and ends up with a focus on the strict protocol of destruction that paper documents with sensitive information are subject to.
Curated by Marcella Beccaria
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