Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984) – Book Launch

Date: Thursday 20 Apr 2023 - Thursday 20 Apr 2023
Venue: LADA
Address: The Garrett Centre, 117A Mansford Street, London, E2 6LX
Access Information: The venue is wheelchair-accessible by lift. Please make sure to read our Covid Protocol before arriving at our building.
Price: Free, but please RSVP

*UPDATE: Please note that for reasons beyond our control the starting time of this event had to change. The launch will now start at 5.30pm promptly.

The Live Art Development Agency is delighted to invite you to the launch of Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984) on Thursday the 20th of April at 5:30pm

Join us to celebrate the new bilingual monograph published by Silvana Editoriale and edited by Jennifer Malvezzi and Flora Pitrolo, which for the first time comprehensively chronicles and sets into today’s context the extraordinary practice of Roberto Taroni and Luisa Cividin.

Material from the artists’ archive will be presented during the launch, and Roberto Taroni will engage in conversation with Ella Finer and Flora Pitrolo about Taroni-Cividin’s practice and trajectory. The discussion will focus among others on their work Interference (1982), shown at the ICA as part of Arte Italiana 1960-1982 – a momentous exhibition for the international circulation of Italian performance and contemporary art.

This event is supported by the Italian Council (2021), Directorate – General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.

Copies of the book will be available to purchase during the launch.

About the book

The practice of Milan-based duo Taroni-Cividin constitutes one of the most groundbreaking yet rarely traversed areas of the Italian experimental performance archive. Active between 1977 and 1984 – during which they produced over 30 performances and films both in Italy and internationally – Roberto Taroni and Luisa Cividin pushed the edges of the live and the recorded, and of cinematic, bodily and spatial practices. In interaction with visual and installation work and through a highly personal use of video and audio technologies, they developed an approach to performance-making that continues to generate questions in some of the contemporary moment’s most pressing debates.

Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984) seeks to do justice to the complexity and richness of Taroni-Cividin’s work, giving the reader a sense of the theoretical perspectives that guided it, bringing to light precious archival materials, and critically re-examining a season of Italian contemporary art which has thus far been largely neglected.

The book cover of ‘Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984)’.

Jennifer Malvezzi and Flora Pitrolo (Eds), Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984). Silvana Editoriale, 2023. Cover image credit: Taroni-Cividin, Decalage, 1981, Firenze. Photo by Gianni Melotti, Courtesy Archivio Gianni Melotti

Taroni Cividin

Biographies

Ella Finer

Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change occupations of space. She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound, a work considering the inherent power in/of that which falls outside of administrative control: how sound resists categorisation in the archive; how sound makes and disperses knowledge beyond the bounds of the institutional building.

Flora Pitrolo

Flora Pitrolo is a scholar, translator, and curator. Currently a Research Fellow in English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, her work investigates the problems of the postmodern through experimental music and performance archives, mostly in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, from the 1980s to the present. Her most recent book is Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias (Palgrave 2022, co-edited with Marko Zubak). She is the author of numerous academic articles, and works as a curator and arts programmer in Italy and the Balkans.

Roberto Taroni

Roberto Taroni began making performance and video art in the mid to late 1970s. In 1977 he started working with Luisa Cividin as Taroni-Cividin, and in the same year founded the space Sixto Notes in Milan. Currently active as Flatform, his works have been presented in international events including the Venice Biennale, the International Week of Performance in Bologna, the Symposium Internationale D’Art Performance in Lyon, the Forum ’80 in Middelburg, the Italian Art 1960-1982 in London and in private galleries and international museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the PAC in Milan.

Access Information

LADA and The Garrett Centre are wheelchair accessible by lift and provide gender inclusive bathrooms. Should you have any particular requirements regarding access or have any questions, please email us and we will be happy to offer further support.

We are continuing to implement measures in the space to ensure that our staff, visitors, and everyone who uses our building, remain safe during the ongoing pandemic and that we protect those who are disproportionately affected by it; please make sure to read our Covid Protocol before arriving at our building.

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