Around 1920, a wealthy man from northern Italy returns from the First World War. Without having actively fought, neither having seen the blood of battle or an actual trench, he asks a group of people to stage for his camera scenes from the war as he imagined it. In 2024, four individuals are asked, in an attempt at freezing time, to didactically re-enact the scenes already staged in the 1920s photographs. In the corridors of a war museum housing a series of dioramas depicting war landscapes without figures, the endless cycle of the representation of war unfolds in an infinite suspended moment.
Biography
Giulio Squillacciotti is an artist and film-director born in Rome in 1982, living and working in Milan. After an education in Medieval Art History and Humanities in Rome and Barcelona, he studied Visual Arts at the University of Architecture in Venice. He was a fellow resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and one of the artists of the Dutch pavilion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale. His work is oriented mainly on the invention and mutation of traditions by merging together fiction and historical facts. Using film, documentary, sound and scenography, Squillacciotti produces research-based investigations that revisits history, crafting new stories from subjective perspectives, religion, language and popular culture.
He has made, among the others, documentaries on the Roman punk scene of the 1990s (“RMHC”, Italy 2012), on exorcism rituals in the Persian Gulf (“Archipelago”, Iran 2017), on cargo ships (“They Thought They Saw a Ghost”, Netherlands 2020), in Iraqi Kurdistan (“The Face That I Loved Let Me Down”, Iraq 2022) and fictional works written and shot in Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Turkey and other countries. He has edited collections of essays, fiction and poetry by foreign writers for the Dutch label Onomatopee and Arbor Editions. His writings and projects have been features in “Visual Ethnography Journal”, “Domus”, “Les œuvres de la voix”, Bruno Editions/Motto Berlin, Humboldt Books, Alla Carta, and other publishing labels. His latest project “What Has Left Since We Left” won the Italian Council Grant, Limburg Film Fonds, Sky Art/Arte Visione award and represented Italy at the Artist’s Film International 2021 from the Whitechapel Gallery in London. He teaches at NABA University in Milan and has led workshops and talks at numerous European institutions.
His work has been exhibited and screened internationally at, among the others, the MUBI platform, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Louvre Museum and Gaité Lyrique in Paris, the Berlin Haus der Kultur der Welt and Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Neues Museum in Weimar, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Screen Space and Monash Gallery in Melbourne, the Manifesta 8, Le Magasin CNAC in Grenoble, Cinema Akil in Dubai, the New York Photo Festival and Dumbo Video in New York City, the Art Institute of Boston, the Instant Image Hall and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Ballroom Marfa in Texas, Het Nieuwe Instituut of Rotterdam, Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture and Istanbul Modern Museum, the Bonniers Konsthal in Stockolm, Fundacion Proa in Buenos Aires, CAC in Vilnius, the Beirut Art Centre in Lebanon, OCAT in Shanghai, the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade and at numerous International Film Festivals; in Italy at PAC, Triennale Museum and ViaFarini in Milan, MACRO, MAXXI, and 16th Quadriennale in Rome, MAMbo and Cineteca in Bologna, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, GAMeC in Bergamo and at the Official Competition of the 33rd, 35th and 36th Torino Film Festival.
