TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai
Artist Francesco Vezzoli made an installation about the role of television in Italy (RAI) in the 1970s. Rai is Italy’s national broadcasting company, and was the number one mass communication form in the seventies. Mr Vezzoli shows that this was groundbreaking tv, or at least television in Italy was showing how the seventies were, historically seen, an important decade. We, at Mimi Berlin, took a stroll through this impressive exhibition and filmed it for yous….’cause just images aren’t enough to visually explain what this installation is about. But, as always when it comes to art exhibitions, you have to see it for yourself. And if you are interested in the, almost extinct, medium of television you should certainly visit this exhibition.
(images and video’s by Mimi Berlin)
“In between individual experiences and collective narratives, the exhibition translates the artist’s gaze into a visual experience that explores 1970s TV production. Italian public TV is interpreted by the artist as a driving force for social and political change in a country in transition from the radicalness of the 1960s to the hedonism of the 1980s, as well as a powerful machine for cultural and identity creation. During that decade, Rai revised its pedagogical mission and distinguished itself for the high cultural quality of its productions, such as the collaborations with film directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Federico Fellini, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Divided between formal austerity and experimental vocation, 1970s television amplified the development of collective imagination into a plurality of landscapes and individual perspectives, anticipating the narratives which characterized the commercial television of the following decade. TV became a specific medium, and its shows went through a progressive transformation: they first shifted from culture to information, and subsequently from information to communication.” (read more fondazioneprada.org)