Transcribed from an introduction to Il Trasloco (Moving out of the Future) presented at Parasol Unit, 13th February 2013 by Richard John Jones.
Image courtesy of Parasol Unit
I wanted to introduce the film by considering two different encounters that I have had with it, prioritising the sensation and experience of my encounters and considering how these two encounters have shaped my understanding of the film and what it means to have screened it in a variety of locations over the past 3 years. It goes without saying that my experience of the film now is vastly different to how it was three years ago so this has not been the way in which I have introduced the film up to now and I am leaving the opportunity open to find alternative ways of learning from each encounter. That is to say, this is not going to be the only way to introduce it in subsequent screenings – this presentation now, is not a model for future presentations.
I first saw Il Trasloco in the summer of 2010, sitting in Federico [1]’s kitchen watching it on his laptop while he provided an alternative narration to the film – he described it as something of a cult classic among Italian speaking academics, students and activists working now who were enamoured by autonomia or interested in Franco Berardi Bifo or vise versa.
Earlier that year, Federico and I had been paired up in a project organised by LuckyPDF that connected artists and writers. I was involved a little bit at the artist-run space, Auto Italia, which at that time was in a nearly derelict car service garage on Glengal Road in East Peckham, very near the Old Kent Road. Federico and I had our first meeting in his living room. He has a great library of books and I went straight to the bookshelf and picked out Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, the meaty tome published by Afterall, and commented that I found it inspiring – he replied, yes, but that there was a glaring omission of Italian Autonomism and also a neglect for the Southern European developments of radical politics, anarchism etc.
This provocation led to a fruitful exchange – I was involved and still am in a radical queer community based in France – something that stemmed from the anti-assimilationist gay liberation movements of the late 70s and the sustainable living movement – the Radical Faeries are a kind of queer hippy autonomist utopia, at least in my mind!
I was thinking through terms like autonomy, participation, protest and activism and I was consumed as to how this could be understood through art, through representation and our relationship with the image: the image of protest, the image of autonomism, the image of community etc. I felt that this had to be considered also in terms of how it intersected with desire – the desire for the image of protest, the desire for the image of autonomy, of community again and so on and so on.
The radical Faeries was founded by Harry Hay, a queer member of the communist party in California in the 70s who rejected any notion of pride and called for queer withdrawal, he demanded complete revolution of patriarchy and rather surprisingly in addition to this for individual, spiritual enlightenment – all this happened in the 70s in California and then was picked up by some Dutch queers in the early 90s. A translation of a translation of an image of desire and radical autonomist politics… this was, for me, a very exciting intersection of a lot of points of interest.
Previously Federico was involved in a semi-live film project called Proh-soh-pa-peer that I made in collaboration with Auto Italia and exhibited also at SPACE in the summer of 2009– he appeared in this alongside some Radical Faeries. I was interested in making an image of him discussing autonomism – maybe I even desired it a little bit!
Image courtesy of Franco Berardi Bifo and Renato de Maria
Just to throw another log on the fire – throughout 2009 I had just finished a documentary film produced with Kate Cooper which documented our search for an offshore company called Headless Ltd. It’s too complicated to go into now – but I was departing from an understanding of autonomism in our contemporary times as relating also to secret societies, to offshore finance, juridical space and states of exception/legal spaces that defined their very being as being outside.
Federico introduced me to autonomism in the following summer, 2010 – Il Trasloco, became the accessible leg-up I needed to understand some key ideas and it was my first digital encounter with Bifo on the screen in Federico’s kitchen that happily developed into several physical meetings, here in London.
I was taken by the film’s narrative but also its style, its rough VHS quality, its tacky early 90s music, the staged scenarios of domesticity – it was distant but not so distant to become exotic – I recognised the style, I could relate to the form – I grew up in the 90s, I watched a lot of TV. I got it, it seemed almost as if it could have been something I had watched then forgotten about and rediscovered years later.
Federico and I thought that it would be a good idea to translate, subtitle and re-screen the film. I thought it would be great to do it at Auto Italia. It seemed like a good platform upon which I could understand the variety of different communities, organisations and works that I was making in that period and I felt that Auto Italia could have the potential to become a workshop for these ideas. Perhaps Auto Italia was at this moment representative to me of a potential site in which all of my previous experiences of communality, collaboration etc etc. could be realised this time through art production – it really was a pure projection – the desire for the image of the utopian artist-run space – interesting that now I am here talking to you about this, interesting how now is also connected to then.
The subtitling and translation was an incredibly laborious process – we were both amateurs. It took hours upon hours of sitting in front of a computer – it was gloriously sunny outside – I recall the pain of having to sit tapping away at a computer when I would rather sit in the park and sunbathe. I thought it was interesting to consider whether subtitling or translation could be an artistic practice, I’m still interested in what it means for this to be played in art institutions, I’m still interested in translation as an art practice or conversely art practice as always some form of translation.
But it was a good summer and I was finally becoming acquainted with what I understand as a key maxim of autonomism – I was really getting quite into the idea of the refusal of work – as I stared longingly out of the window – I wondered how it could be put into practice. But then again, this was a labour of passion, we did it because we wanted to.
We continued, finished our artisanal translation and introduced it at Auto Italia. I remember feeling the excitement of discovering something new together, that I had found something which seemed to act as a vessel in which I could finally understand something to which I felt physically and intellectually drawn to.
Others seemed interested too – shortly afterwards we were invited to present it again at the ICA. We suddenly had to ask ourselves what the plan was for the future of the translation. At the moment of translating and screening it, in many respects for us, the work was over.
In addition, the film represented to us a dislocation from time. Our additional title ‘Moving Out of the Future’ represented a kind of end of futurity that we felt marked the end of autonomism depicted in the film. I considered this film’s temporal and special trajectory – I wonder whether our translation was more than adding extra titles. I wondered whether in ‘autonomous’ places or ‘queer’ places how time could be remapped. The desire for the image opens up the possibility to dislocate temporal distance. Points of identification are also moments where we break linear temporal direction. My recognition of the dated format of this documentary being an example of that.
Image courtesy of Franco Berardi Bifo and Renato de Maria
The film depicts the flows of styles, groups, music, people, police and politics through the communal domestic space – it is suggested that Bifo’s presence throughout was his ability to ride out each new group, whether it be new-age spirituality, new wave or punk. It seems to me that Bifo’s ability to find points of identification, his presence throughout seems to go against the director, Renato De Maria’s attempt at standard chronology. But as we move through the house we see empty corners marked by the memory of bodies sleeping or blank walls evocative of the murals that were once painted underneath. There is a close-up shot of the wall texture combined with a sound recording of someone asking us to come inside – a shot used throughout the film – it draws our eyes not to what appears but rather what remains underneath, unseen, behind the screen, in the past or maybe also in this room. Federico has commented before on how the house becomes a character in the film. Yet, I wonder whether the walls are actually projection screens (echoed by de Maria’s use of shadow play) - wall as screen – the screen as the wall of the house we are in this evening.
To move briefly to another encounter, I wanted to describe a screening that Federico and I did in June in Glasgow last year. We took the train from London, it broke down north of Newcastle, we were stricken for some time, we moved forwards, backwards, we changed trains. We talked more on that trip than I think we ever have done. It marked a kind-of two year anniversary of the project although I think at the time this didn’t really occur to us. We had presented it in Bristol, Geneva and Rotterdam – each time we found a different audience, we presented it using a different speech. Il Trasloco became the punctuation to on-going conversations.
Amongst this I had collaboratively organised a four day exhibition, conference and publication called We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion as Co-Director of Auto Italia which by the summer 2011, I had become. Federico was greatly involved, Bifo was too along with many others. The events were intended to discuss more formally what the notion of ‘independence’ meant both in the context of Auto Italia as an independent artist run space but also how these ideas could be applied more broadly. The riots had just happened, Auto Italia was now on a street front space on the Old Kent Road – luckily, the former car showroom windows had maintained intact. Autonomia, the radical left, autonomist feminism, and the excessive demands of the Wages for Housework campaign formed the core source-material to the events and acted as a methodology for the project.
Image courtesy of Franco Berardi Bifo and Renato de Maria
These other screenings and the Time and Motion project had all been and gone yet again we were asked to present Il Trasloco – and again to introduce it. Each time we do this, the digital file remains the same but our lives, experiences and understandings are transformed. The audience, the country the institution and the space are all different – each time, it is never really the same film.
In Glasgow I saw it differently. By that time, Auto Italia had somewhat transformed and I was already moving on – again I wondered what it might mean for artists to work with translation or for translation to be an artistic practice. Again, I considered what it would mean for the film to be screened in an art context, where each screening would be like a performance – always with an introduction from Federico and I.
I was reflecting on the fact that I was both excited that we were finding a new audience in Glasgow yet somehow concerned that I was discovering a new distance to the film, that it seemed that my desire for the image of whatever it was… now, whatever that was I couldn’t quite remember. I couldn’t see the charming elements which had been points of my original identification with it, rather I noticed some of the spelling mistakes in the subtitles, I was frustrated by the inaudible parts, I was more aware of my feelings of confusion in terms of how the film related both to my evolving politics and my own sense of direction or orientation. The film was no longer like a pool in whose reflective surface I could bathe in moments of identification but rather a signpost I would pass every so often on a journey unsure as to whether I had seen it before or not.
Yet there was a moment towards the end of the film when I saw it in Glasgow with which I found a new affinity. Although there is a consideration of the passing of time to be both a joyful but melancholic experience – that the passing of time marks also the passing of utopia - there is a moment when Berardi calls into an empty room – he shouts ‘AH AH’ – listening to the echo, enjoying the acoustics (also with melancholy) hearing his echo reverberate around him (also emphasising the emptiness of this house of friends). As he moves through the cleared space the sound is replaced with the noise of the warfare. The first gulf war literally echoes through the house.
We then see that it comes from a television left in one of the rooms – again, time and space seem to collapse, the echoes in the room coming from the television screen reverberate in the space we see on the screen. At this moment, the film cuts to an image of war, the image of war appears in the room in Glasgow the sound of the gulf war also reverberates within the room we are sitting in. We are now in the film or at least, the film arrives in the room after breaking down, moving forward then backward and finally changing course.
Over there reverberated in here, back then appears right now and it is, in fact, the joyful melancholy induced by the desire for the image of ‘whatever it is that I don’t remember’, which lasts as a constant reminder that although we move out of the future, although we turn out the lights on utopia, we move, we are in a trajectory and this is no longer constrained to a linearity of time which was only ever an illusion in the first place.
Image courtesy of Franco Berardi Bifo and Renato de Maria
