THREE SAMPLES OF CREATIVE WORK – MGF
Spazio Comune, 03/30/2023 edit, hd color video, sound, 25:30 min, Italy, Marco G. Ferrari.
A work in progress excerpt which will be part of a larger semi-documentary film project, Porta Maggiore (forthcoming spring 2025). The feature length film explores the relationship between the built and natural environments of the eastern periphery of the Roman suburbs (Roma Est) and follows a community of resident activists that are protecting Lago Bullicante (ExSnia)––a naturally formed lake and ecosystem created through accidental and illegal human intervention, located within an abandoned viscose factory complex.
The Spazio Comune sequence documents the same resident activists in the temporary opening of the Nuovo Cinema Aquila (Pigneto, Rome) through the creation of a self-run neighborhood programming table during a period in which the cinema was closed to the public by the municipality (2017). The sequence foreshadows the conflicts between public and private spaces, highlighting the challenges resident activists will encounter in protecting the lake from developers.
Porta Maggiore is informed by a series of interrelated enquiries including an attempt to link the spectacle of filmmaking to the process of individuation; a search for liminal spaces of the periphery and the sense of alienation behind them; to question the forms of resistance and acceptance within the process of change; and the desire to find unity between the individual and collective in a supposed ‘post-fascist’ culture.
Spirit Level, 2015–17, hd color video, sound, 31:38 min, India. Marco G. Ferrari.
Peering through a tourist’s lens, Spirit Level is about a search for the particularities of what makes a place sacred and the residual artifacts of a vulnerable state of being.
Filmed in Jaipur, New Delhi and Koliyak, India, during the fall of 2015, I focused on recording three locations that contained or promoted a holy site. Each place is interconnected through the substance of water: the filtered water within the swimming pool of a five star hotel in Jaipur; the collected water within the step-well of the Hazrat Nizamuddin ki Baoli in New Delhi; and the water flowing between the low and high tides of the Gulf of Khambhat, where the Nishkalank Mahadev Temple sits one-mile out at sea, approachable only during low tidal shifts.
During the assembly of the images I was inspired by the Sanskrit word Trimūrti, meaning “of three forms.” A Hindu concept of reality consisting of the functions of creation, preservation and destruction personified by the triad of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. I referenced this cyclical concept, and my observations of how during ancient cultural conquests materials and symbols were extracted from architectural structures and reused in constructing new sites, as guides to build, layer and deconstruct the images and sounds of each place I visited. This approach led me to superimposing fragmented compositions and abstracting scenes, which are at times digitally scaled in horizontal and vertical directions.
Underpinning the camera’s perspective and image assembly is the relationship between observation and interpretation, of covering and revealing, of openness and imposition. As a result, overtime, the role of camera changed from a tool that recorded interaction to one that created an engagement with the materials and people of the place. At first, the camera’s presence is less pronounced as I was inundated with a constellation of energy overlooking Jaipur’s landscape. In New Delhi at the step-well within an enclave of buildings, I was hesitant as to what boundaries the camera could cross—so the view is through the dargah marble screen, peering through the openings, wanting to observe but unsure how and why. But as the story turns to the third and final site of the Mahadev Temple, the presence of the camera is reinforced and the documentary process of filming is reversed. Visitors to the site begin to confront the camera––some performing, some staring and others asking questions. At one point a curious woman sincerely asks, ”how are you feeling now?”
Much like the air bubble in a level that is used to measure the position of an object, dependent on place, substance and perspective, the film, and perhaps in a more revealing sense, my spirit, oscillates between these three forms.
Nacelle, 2013-15, hd color video, 16-mm b/w and color film digital transfer, sound, 35 min, USA, Marco G. Ferrari.
The word “nacelle” means the streamlined car of an aircraft—from the Latin navicella, meaning “a little ship.” In the film Nacelle, Ferrari traces an idea in formation and the complexities that arise within a contained space as a vessel travels from point to point, where a movement from thought to feeling is cycled through.
The first part of a trilogy, Nacelle is about a fictional B-roll film crew stuck in the back of a moving truck that travels across five Chicagoland locations: the Byron Nuclear Generating Station; a DeKalb Wind Turbine Farm; the Cook County Department of Corrections’ Division XI Facility; Lower Wacker Drive; and Miller Beach, Indiana. As the line producer, camera operator, soundman, driver and the locations interact, the fragility of their relationships is exposed, and a reaction is triggered. Sound and vision question, concept entangles, the environment informs, and intuition drives the picture.
Filmed in digital video and 16mm film during Ferrari’s final quarter in the MFA program at the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, he worked with five artists: three as actors; one as actor/art director/production assistant; and an assistant director/camera operator. Ferrari’s previous films are rooted in the use of documentary shooting techniques combined with an exploratory method of montage that builds meaning through the assembly of images and sounds. Often working alone and without a fictional construct, in this work he reversed the approach, and explored a narrative method: writing a script, building dialog and action through rehearsals, and sharing the creative process with a cast and crew.