Before They Break, Before They Die, They Fly!

It was a direct linguistic act, one of the most basic, that guided Anna Franceschini’s Before They Break, Before They Die, They Fly! And on closer inspection, this imperative has oriented the artist’s production in its entirety, always having focused on cinema as a perceptive phenomenon and on film as a viewing experience. 

Her encounter with a well-known figure of Rome’s human landscape was fatal. Mago Guarda is a wandering fool, an amateur magician enchanting his onlookers with the pureness of his entertainment, his back-to-basics approach to the spectacular reminiscent of cinema’s early days. Initially, Franceschini performed an autopsy on the object repertory used by Mago Guarda in his sleight of hand performances; during her search for tools similar to those adopted by the magician, the artist was distracted by the inventions of contemporary physique amusante available from shops around the city centre and from specialised retailers. The upshot of this light-hearted diversion in the procedure was the creation of a series of experimental images –i.e. film footage of the occurrence of a phenomenon entirely subject to the earthly laws of physics– yet capable of arousing a gasp of marvel in the onlooker. As usual, the artist calls upon the onlooker to suspend their incredulity in the face of the moving image and to enjoy its ubiquitous nature, constantly on the verge between nature and artifice. The title of the work is a distortion of a quote from Timothy Morton's book Realistic Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality: “[The objects], before they break, before they die, they exist.”

Produced with the support of MACRO Museum, Rome. Courtesy: the artist, Vistamare, Milano /Pescara and Emanuela Campoli, Paris

This screening is part of Paradoxical Sleep, the third chapter of the film program TUTTAUNANOTTE, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, and unfolding in four chapters between November 1, 2025 and December 26, 2025, with the films of each chapter streaming for two weeks.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.