Books

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Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

By Cesare Davolio
Mediamatic Off-Line, Vol. 10 No. 2
Stichting Mediamatic Foundation, Amsterdam, 2001
13 pp, illus, with CD-ROM (Mac/Win)
Annual subscription: Euro 33 for 3 issues
ISBN 0920 7864
ISBN 90 74728 31 6

Reviewed by Mike Leggett, 17 Ivy Street, Darlington, NSW 2008, Australia
E-mail: legart@ozemail.com.au


"Let 10 men and women meet who are resolved in the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment despair ends and tactics begins-" Sadie Plant

Aphorisms abound where human behaviour is at its least rational. It is a tendency celebrated by the surrealists and imitated by commentators and artists alike. By responding to public events in which many innocents are killed by a few, the turn of phrase and the repeated visual image becomes a foisted representation of the outrage with which we as by-standers in the contemporary teleopolis have to deal - the blood of the victims becomes the discourse of another tomorrow.

A " . . . poetic reflection on the highly symbolic kidnapping of Aldo Moro.." is Cesare Davolio's description of his CD-ROM 'Annunciation'. President Moro of Italy was kidnapped in the streets of Rome in March 1978 following a bloody gun battle with members of the Red Brigades (Brigade Rosse or Br). For the next 54 days, the media 'ran with the story' until negotiations expired and Moro was found shot dead in car abandoned in another Rome street equidistant between the headquarters of the governing Christian Democrats and the Communist Party.

The printed essay by Paul Groot in MMOff-Line describes these events as "..a contemporary drama with classical overtones.." and the accompanying essays by other MM staffers Arie Altena and Dirk van Weelden likewise analyse the events and their representation in this artwork. These commentaries are at a certain distance from the experience of interacting with Davolio's multimedia work and by providing a contemporary context, are more about the writers and their immersion in the real politik of European discourse, shared with Davolio if not lead by his work. Salvatore Puglia provides an apologia, stating the imagination of fellow "members of my generation, of my intellectual peers, was derived from comic book heroes." This was a generation raised on daily media reports displaying violent times in Italy (and elsewhere) and some of them chose to lash out at an oligarchy that, including church, organised crime and foreign operatives, whilst keeping Italy outwardly prosperous, impoverished its social, political and cultural life.

The annunciation is in fact three announcements in this one work: the events of the 54 days and their aftermath, related through media reports of the time; the extraordinary 95 'letters' that were sent out my Moro during that time (only a selection are here - they were partly an agenda for the rapprochement he planned to bring about between the right and the left of Italian politics); and the response 20 years later by the CD-ROM creator, who was most likely a child at the time.

Cesare Davolio, the author, is also a designer and navigating the work, as with the old style Mediamatic, turns each page with the striking use of screen space, colour and line, the tools of the graphic designer. Arising from an installation made during a stay in the south of Holland, the ephemera and evidence collected from the event does not attempt, as so many television documentaries have, to set-up speculative interviews or entertain with assorted conspiracy theories, but to present decidedly 2-dimensional and visually vivid souvenirs from those times. A typographical animation with the words 'terror', 'horror', 'error', is either literally a play with words, or moves towards a moral position that says far more than the simplistic post-WTC rhetoric of 'terrorist'.

What is the connection between Mediamatic magazine and an event in Italy from over 20 years ago? Most of Mediamatic's contributors have a tangible connection with Holland - Davolio studied in Maastricht - Mediamatic has established a strong reputation over its 15 year history of addressing political as well as aesthetic issues contemporary to the European milieu and presenting them using the print and graphical design approach special to the Dutch tradition. They have also been champions of artists who use CD-ROM to distribute their work and ideas, being among the first print publications to include discs as part of each issue. Mediamatic magazine is now on-line at www.mediamatic.net, but the distinctive graphic and print style is maintained in slimmer form as Mediamatic Off-Line, issued three times a year, complete with several essays on each featured CD-ROM, by subscription or through specialist booksellers.

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