Wu Tsang, Into a Space of Love, 2018, digital file (video still). Commissioned and produced by Frieze and Gucci. Courtesy the artist.
The Pecci Centre to premiere The Second Summer of Love. After New York and London, the series of artists’ films commissioned and produced by Gucci and Frieze, arrives in Italy
From November the 6th to the 25th, the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci will present the Italian première of the film exhibition The Second Summer of Love, commissioned and produced by Gucci and Frieze, as a further event celebrating the 30 years anniversary of Centro Pecci. The Second Summer of Love is a series of artists’ films that narrates another anniversary with reference to 1988 – the year electronic music and youth culture exploded in the UK, later expanding into Europe and the US.
Since its opening as the first contemporary art institution created in Italy, Centro Pecci has been a centre of cultural production, committed to artistic research in the wider sense of the term. From 1988 to the present, it has produced over 250 events, including exhibitions of art, design and fashion, as well as an insightful program of activities connected with literature, music, performance and theatre.
The Second Summer of Love is a series of artists’ films that narrates another anniversary: 1988 – the year electronic music and youth culture exploded in the UK, later expanding into Europe and the US. The roots of acid house and rave scenes – the way these revolutionized youth lifestyles and how they had a lasting impact on contemporary culture comparable to that of the counterculture of the 1960s – provide inspiration for work by Jeremy Deller, while the scenes that preceded and influenced rave inspire the works by Wu Tsang and Josh Blaaberg.
The Second Summer of Love
Film by Wu Tsang, Josh Blaaberg, Jeremy Deller
Commissioned and produced by Gucci and Frieze
November 6 – 26, 2018: Italian Première
Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato Viale della Repubblica 277, 59100, Prato, Italy
centropecci.it
THE SECOND SUMMER OF LOVE
Screening program:
November, 6 – 11: Wu Tsang
Into a Space of Love (25’33”), 2018
In this magical realist documentary, Wu Tsang explores the history and legacy of New York house music, rooted in the real-life experiences of a predominantly black and Latino queer community, and the struggles of queer/POC liberation movements. The film blends past, present, and near-future visions of New York nightlife from intergenerational scene-makers and DJs, and questions the uroborosian tension between underground culture and appropriation. It mixes the tenderness of aging with the vigilance of youth, and digs into what it really means for people to make a deeper, lifelong commitment to nightlife.
Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. Her projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including MoMA, Guggenheim,Whitney, LACMA, Tate Modern, Stedelijk, Berlinale, Hot Docs, and SXSW.
November, 13 – 18: Josh Blaaberg
Distant Planet: The Six Chapters of Simona (28’44”), 2018
Italo disco is often seen as the lesser cousin of US and UK pop, a cultural hierarchy built on a set of shared assumptions relating to nationhood, language, identity and originality. In Distant Planet, Josh Blaaberg combines fiction, archive and interview to explore how emotional impulses are at the core of these and all assumptions: how reality and desire are inherently intertwined. The film imagines a universe where mid-1980s New York runs riot for the latest Italo releases and Campari fountains are installed by Presidential decree. Through archive footage, interviews and newly-imagined realities, Distant Planet takes three Italo disco stars and journeys with them as they reconnect with the forgotten fantasies of the music. In doing so, our Italo stars are elevated to their rightful places in pop history. Immortalised as demigods on the slopes of Mount Etna, all loss is defeated and cultural hierarchies overcome.
Josh Blaaberg is a filmmaker and visual artist, whose work spans both the film and artworlds. His work is concerned with national identity, memory and loss. His work has been presented at Sundance Film Festival and SXSW.
November, 20 – 25: Jeremy Deller
Everybody In The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (61’35”), 2018
Acid house is often portrayed as emerging sui generis, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously-impregnable boundaries of class, identity and geography. With Everybody in the Place the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller upturns popular notions of rave and acid house, situating them at the very centre of the seismic social changes reshaping 1980s Britain. Rare and unseen archive materials map the journey from protest movements to abandoned warehouse raves, the white heat of industry bleeding into the chaotic release of the dancefloor.
Jeremy Deller: the work of 2004 Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller focuses on socialhistory, often shining a light on the pressure points where pop culture and politicscollide. His work has included organising a life drawing class with Iggy Pop, making afilm about Depeche Mode fans and travelling across America towing a car destroyedin a Baghdad bomb attack.
THE MUSEUM IMAGINED. STORIES FROM THIRTY YEARS OF CENTRO PECCI
The exhibition The Museum Imagined, on view until June the 25th, reads the museum’s history through an original itinerary of facts, statistical data, memories and artworks from the collection and from the exhibition history, curated by the new director Cristiana Perrella. More than a celebration, the exhibition is a tale where the reality of what happened alternate with an imaginative museum vision that reinterprets and configures past in light of the present sensibility, by projecting it in a possibile future. The exhibition is followed through a program of events – theatre, video, performance – including the series The Second Summer of Love.
