Shipwrecks -Naufragi

"The radical shipwreck of our existence". This is how Giulio Latini, in the conversation with Lorenzo Madaro published here, describes in a line as complex as it is direct, the existential condition that transpires, exudes from every shot of the audiovisual trilogy Shipwrecks/Naufragi, the work subject of this book/catalogue. A book that aims to enclose more than twenty years of work and a production developed in many different phases, here well documented and accompanied by the texts of eminent scholars such as Guido Barbieri, Giovanni Bietti, Laura Cherubini, Marco Maria Gazzano, Lorenzo Madaro.
It was in the early s that Giulio Latini began to refl ect on the themes of shipwreck in reaction to the atrocious events experienced by many populations who at the time had entered into a fratricidal war in the Balkans. Fierce events in their madness that forced thousands of people to emigrate to Italy as well. For the fi rst time in history, quite late compared to other European nations, it was not we Italians who were seeking fortune abroad. Rather, it was abroad, which saw Italy as America, the country of hope and salvation or, using the title of the celebrated drama fi lm by director Gianni Amelio, LAMERICA.
Thus, the fi rst images of migrations conveyed by the still electronic media of the time, such as television, gather in Latini. Hence the war, which for the imagination of Italians belonged to the mechanical means of reproduction in black and white (this is how we learnt about the Second World War), was now delegated to electronic images of television or video. War, migration, its documentation, its translation into an image, now representing the starting point of an imaginary consolidation in Latini from the Nineties. It is by following this exercise of reasoning and feeling that Latini will structure a path of artistic and theoretical refl ection that will lead him to dialogue with the artwork, symbol of the shipwreck, The Raft of the Medusa () by the French artist ThéodoreGéricault. A masterpiece that condenses in an image the entire existential crisis of a population by this time adrift.
"The radical shipwreck of our existence", Latini tells us. A shipwreck, an existential condition that, upon closer inspection, permeates all of Western society today and which becomes evident the moment we come into contact with the work Scène de Naufrage, destined to open up the space and time of the Shipwrecks/Naufragi trilogy, preciously enriched by the creatively productive dialogue with the composer Alessandro Cipriani. In contact right from the start, from the fi rst shot, from those ropes twisted like dead bodies that fade into the image of a little girl, on the beach, looking at the horizon of the sea. And immediately [...]