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

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

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