Endings: Nightclub

Endings: Nightclub (2025) is a collaborative work by artist Marina Apollonio (Trieste, 1940), whose exploration of optical and kinetic art has been ongoing since the 1960s, and composer and sound artist Bottin (Guglielmo Bottin, Venice, 1977). Drawing inspiration from the hypnotic spiral movements that have long defined Apollonio’s practice—particularly her lacquered wood pieces, Fusione Circolare (2016) and Fusione Circolare Doppia (2019)—the video depicts a spinning vinyl record that embodies the dialogue between the two artists. The image captures the rhythmic expansion and contraction of black and white lines. Meanwhile, a fluorescent yellow turntable stylus, labelled Nightclub, traces the record groove from start to finish. 

As the record plays, Apollonio’s op-art is activated as a kinetic sculpture, its oscillations synchronizing with the music. Bottin's electromechanical composition pulsates eerily, like deconstructed techno music. It is entirely composed of locked grooves. 

Bottin explains: “The only sound you normally hear in the end groove is the crackling of the stylus on dust and scratches or the faint echo of the final track. Several audio clips identical duration—1.33 seconds, the time it takes for the 12-inch disc to make one full rotation—were recorded from different records. Without adding any other sounds, these fragments of ‘media noise’ were filtered and composed as tesserae in a polyrhythmic mosaic — a layered arrangement of accumulations, subtractions, and sudden interruptions.” Visual and auditory perception converge here in a sonic-kinetic artwork where music gives way to silence.

This screening is part of Late check-out, the fourth 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.