Marco Poloni THE ANALOGUE ISLAND

Campagne Première
29 OCTOBER - 10 DECEMBER 2011
Chausseestrasse 116 , D-10115 Berlin 



The work of Marco Poloni spans cinema, photography and installation. Over the past several, the artist has been building an index of plots and problems of the Mediterranean Sea. This archive documents and reformulates a number of geopolitical scripts and narratives of this area, focusing on relations between social invisibility and power, subjectivity and ideology.
In the two films presented here, the artist investigates power configurations in Sicily and their effects on its topography. Poloni reads this island – the geographical epicentre of the entire Mediterranean Sea – as a symptom and prototype of nation-wide malgovernance. This analysis also provides insights into the emergence of parasitic power networks at a larger scale.
“Scomparsa delle lucciole,” 2011 (“Disappearance of the Fireflies,” S-16mm film on HD video, 19min), is an experimental narrative about power relations and entanglements between State and Mafia, set in a devastated region of the island. The film takes its title and its cue from a stark image proposed in 1975 by Pasolini, in an article that analysed power transformations in Italy and anticipated the spectacularization of politics. The film attempts to expand Pasolini's poetic image by incorporating the Mafia, the obscure historical companion to State's power. It articulates a number of concepts and narrative threads: the Mafia as faceless power, its impact on the urban landscape – in particular through unfinished architecture – and Sicily's relationship to time and expenditure.
“The Analogue Dam,” 2010 (S-16mm film on HD video, 8min30, non synchronous voice-over, 21min), explores the ghostly Sicilian dam of Blufi, one of the most impressive of a series of unfinished works of public architecture in the Italian south. Mismanaged and infiltrated by the Mafia, these uncompleted projects epitomize the difficulties of a certain “South” to take hold of its future, and call into question Robert Smithson’s concept of “ruins in reverse.” The filmic sequence loosely intersects with a voice-over that shifts from one angle to the next: descriptive, historical, political, aesthetic.


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