GAMeC continues its participation in Artists’ Film International, the prestigious network dedicated to video art, created in 2008 at the initiative of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The network includes some of the most important contemporary art institutions internationally – currently more than twenty – as well as artists from all over the world.

This thirteenth edition of the event will also continue the format adopted last year, when museums and institutions, closed due to the pandemic, promoted the selected videoworks online through their websites and social channels.
However, the 2021 edition of the exhibition will be hybrid, and thus will also allow, where possible, the public to view the various exhibition realities around the world in person.

As usual, each institution was asked to nominate an artist from their country and to present their work through a video on the subject of the proposed theme, which for this edition is “Care”.

For GAMeC, the curators Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni have selected the artist and filmmaker Giulio Squillacciotti (Rome, 1982) with What Has Left Since We Left (2020).
From 28 April to 23 May the work will be presented in GAMeC’s Spazio Zero.

Furthermore, from 15 April the GAMeC website will also host a selection of films offered by the other institutions taking part in the event: Whitechapel Gallery, London; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Contemporary Art Centre – CAC, Vilnius; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires.

Giulio Squillacciotti’s work is inspired by real events, historical and anthropological research, and places, either experienced or abandoned, that tell personal or collective stories, enabling the creation of narratives based on subjective viewpoints, discoveries, religious beliefs or popular culture. Using film, documentary, audio and set design, Squillacciotti develops his reflections on traditions, either invented or those that have evolved over time, through a mixture of fiction and historical facts.

Entirely given over to Squillacciotti, Spazio Zero, GAMeC’s project room, will host the first screening in an Italian museum of What Has Left Since We Left, a film produced by Careof and Kingswood Films, with the support of the Italian Council and Limburg Film Fonds.

With the assistance of a British interpreter, the last three countries still members of the European Union are gathered in the Treaty Room at Maastricht in an attempt to deal with the sense of loss caused by a now disintegrated Europe. The conversation allows their political and personal relations to metaphorically intertwine, obliging them to confront their crisis of identity and to recognise what remains, what no longer exists, and what their Union might still be.

In company with What Has Left Since We Left, a selection of the director’s earlier short films will also be presented: Scala C – Interno 8 (2017), La dernière image (2015) and Zimmerreise (2010), a trilogy on the theme of places – some imagined, some inhabited, some abandoned – which remain protagonists and guardians of past experiences. As the camera explores the interior of a house, the empty floor of a skyscraper, and the rooms of a modern art museum, voices and off-screen stories accompany the visual journey, speaking to us of relationships and absences.

After all, what is Europe if not the apartment 8 of Stairway C, with arbitrary and extended borders; a pool of ideals, a space for debate on shared themes, considerations and treatments, with different proportions and consequences?

These four places also enable comparison of other subjects in relation to their environment.

The flow of messages on an answering machine in Scala C – Interno 8 allows the story to be told of the unconsummated love between Fulvio Pesarini and Livia Bellagamba. Fulvio’s voice resounds in the dust and gloom of an empty and “abandoned” apartment in Rome in which everything remains frozen, though also cared for, protected and orderly.

In La dernière image, a single sequence-shot shows us the rooms of a deserted museum, that have seemingly been abandoned, while a female voice narrates events related to another abandonment, by a person with whom she shared time and space.

Lastly, in Zimmerreise, a woman wanders around the nineteenth floor of a building in an unnamed industrial city. Through a series of instructions that she has received in letters, she has been shown how to paint an imaginary landscape in which she is able to meet the author of those very letters.

Giulio Squillacciotti (Rome, 1982) is an artist, film director and researcher; he lives and works in Maastricht (NL) and Milan.
In 2018–19 he was the Residency Fellow at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and one of the artists in the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He studied the History of Medieval Art in Barcelona and Rome, where he graduated in Human Sciences in 2006. He studied a Master’s degree in the Visual Arts at the Università di Architettura IUAV in Venice, from which he graduated with Honours. In 2010 he was selected to join the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at the FAR with Walid Raad. He won a scholarship from the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice).