A primal scream; is it that of the blue men, that of a monstrous creature, or perhaps that of a changing territory? An hour away from Venice, in the province of Pordenone, lives the only Tuareg community in Italy. Although they are no longer nomadic, they maintain a singular relationship with their origins and the land, passed down and preserved through stories and music in the course of journeys and many movements.

Gondwana

A. is obsessed with his image. Like a post-modern Narcissus, he projects himself in the endless choices that social media devices offer him. Riccardo Giacconi creates a disquieting film about a teenager who gets lost in the maze of the never-ending reproductions of his Dorian Grayesque portrait. Taking to new and yet unexplored extremes, the fixation with the digital screens in their many guises, the film works like an almost endless fall – without any kind of parachute – through the network of images hidden behind and inside other images.

Pluperfect

The filmmaker spent a year at Atelier Colla, one of the world’s largest and oldest puppet theatres, which has existed for some 300 years and houses over 3,000 puppets. In reverse chronology, the film – which was written by an artificial neural network – depicts the rituals of the puppeteers.

Fingerpicking

With formal precision, Riccardo Giacconi proposes a curious and surprising dialogue which articulates the old tradition of puppetry with robotics and artificial intelligence: two totally different forms of research and creation that nevertheless share a passion for the movement of anthropomorphic bodies and their endless possibilities.