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Carlo’s Vision

Rosalind Nashashibi

This video is no longer available

Rosalind Nashashibi, Carlo’s Vision (still), 2011.

An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories Carlo’s Vision
Rosalind Nashashibi
2011

11 Minutes

Date
September 6–20, 2021

Carlo’s Vision is a 16mm film based on an episode in the unfinished novel Petrolio by the writer, poet, and legendary Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The episode that inspired Rosalind Nashashibi’s film describes the vision experienced by Carlo, the protagonist of Petrolio. Rather than filming the vision exactly as it is described in the novel, Nashashibi has taken the protagonists, the props, and the location, imported them into the present day and used them as the departure point for her film, thus using a template from the early 1970s and employing it in exactly the same location in 2011. The result is a mixture of observational documentary and fiction, in which Carlo is pulled along Rome’s Via Torpignattara on a director’s dolly, observing the long march of a young man, The Shit, and his fiancée Cinzia. Carlo is towed backwards by three gods, two speaking and one silent; with his back to them he can hear what they are thinking, their interior monologues. These prophetic figures provide an interpretation of what Carlo is witnessing, commenting on the past and present governance of Rome, and on class and sexuality as manipulated today by Italy’s power structures. Filmed on Rome’s Via Torpignattara in summer 2011, the vision experienced by Carlo is differentiated from reality by the use of color. The shift between reality and vision passes through Carlo’s gaze. When looking through his eyes, we see fragments of bodies, hairstyles, clothing, and sexual parts, which are first suffused in a bright red light, turning to orange, yellow, and finally vivid green as he proceeds along the blocks of the street. When the point of view goes back to the procession and to the reactions to it from the outside, we return to natural colors with a more steady and objective gaze. Through these techniques, simultaneous layers of reality are described, and the magical friction of the film lies in the borders where simultaneous realities meet.

Carlo’s Vision is presented as part of the program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories, curated by Lukas Brasiskis and designed to precede the online symposium The State of the Moving Image (September 17–19).

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

Category
Film, Contemporary Art, Literature
Subject
Video Art, Appropriation Art, Subjectivity
Return to An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based artist working in film and painting. Her films use both documentary and speculative languages, where real-life observations are merged with paintings, fictional, or sci-fi elements to propose models of collective living. Her paintings likewise operate on another level of subjective experience, they frame arenas or pools of potential where people or animals may appear, often in their own context of signs and apparitions that signal their position for the artist. Nashashibi has shown her works in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah Biennial X. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017 and won Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. She represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennial. Her most recent solo shows include Vienna Secession, CAAC Seville, Chicago Art Institute and Kunstinstuut Melly, Rotterdam. She was National Gallery artist in residence 2020.

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