Extra DRY #03: Anna Valeria Borsari

Extra DRY is a project of collaboration between Peep-Hole and DRY Cocktails & Pizza. The initiative comes from a shared desire to take contemporary art out of its usual places and experiment with its possible insertion in different contexts.

For the third consecutive season, videos will be shown by Anna Valeria Borsari, Ugo La Pietra, Luca Maria Patella and Franco Vaccari, each for a period of three months.
 The projects by the artists are “seamlessly” inserted in the spaces of DRY and stage a different mode of experiencing artworks. The videos installed in the various spaces of the venue can be seen during regular opening hours.

From 19 July to 17 October 2016, for Extra DRY, Anna Valeria Borsari presents “Il testimone”; “Autoritratto in una stanza” and “Attraversarsi”.

Il testimone (The Witness)
8mm film transferred to video, 1976-77, 3’33”
The artist walks down a portico and makes a point-of-view shot of what she sees: a seated man, initially at a distance, gradually gets closer. He has dark glasses, and for an instant the artist is reflected in their lenses as she shoots, asking him to bear witness to having seen her.

Autoritratto in una stanza (Self-Portrait in a Room)
video, 1977, 10’03”. Courtesy of the artist and Archivio Galleria del Cavallino.
The artist’s intention to make her self-portrait is denied during the making of the work itself: a study of her body, through pencil tracings left on the walls, is followed by the study of the room. From the view of earth left intact on the floor, the image shifts to the sparking of the water of the Grand Canal.

Attraversarsi (Crossing Oneself)
Slideshow of photographs transferred to digital, 1977, 1’05”
The artist walks down a long portico, while at the two ends two photographers simultaneously make one photo every seven seconds. The editing of the two sequences underlines the central moment in which Anna Valeria Borsari, equidistant from the two vantage points, “crosses herself.”