Rossella Biscotti: The City

Protocinema presents Rossella Biscotti’s new five-channel video installation, “The City, 2018″ in a subterranean space in Istanbul. “The City” visits Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old neolithic archeological site, recognised as the earliest urban development, to reflect on the society that is being dug up, and the society that is doing the digging. The first narrative of Biscotti’s installation looks at the present, how an emergent international living-community comes together, forming a network of relationships between specialists, excavators, academics and local staff as professional knowledge mingles with personal living-histories. Biscotti allows the archeologists’ questions to move throughout the site, creating a thread between their modern voices and the ancient buildings they are unearthing. The parallel narrative of “The City”, also looks at the past, by way of ‘ontologies’ of specific archeological objects. Biscotti’s camera follows the journey of a given object, how it is handled, decontextualized from its location and re-contextualized within an archaeological narrative: from excavation pit, to lab, to archive, and so forth. Over the duration of this fifty minute video, we, the viewers, are in the present, alongside the diggers. Towards the end of this immersion, we are suggested to be part of the past, watching a future excavation of the present. Biscotti’s images create an atmosphere where the viewer is led from the details of the excavation’s techniques and materiality, to the archeologists’ theories on the societal structures of the ancient civilization, and aims to result in a questioning of the formation of ideologies and relationships within contemporary society.