It began as a mistake.
It Has To Be Fun Domenico Quaranta Sometimes, when considering the work of artist bands — a term that I prefer to the dull “group” or the over serious “collective”— I think that art is the way they found to stay together: keep the conversation going, meet up sometimes, laugh out loud, and party. With artist couples it’s different: they stay together, they move together, maybe they have kids together. With larger groups of friends, you know how it goes: people find a partner, get a serious job, start a life in a faraway city, and it becomes harder and harder to spend time together, unless you find a strong link. Art may provide that link. Art is usually a long term project, that requires dedication and motivation. It demands frequent online and live meetings, long chat and email conversations, a strong friendship and a lot of conflict to keep being a band. Art ain’t easy, Anselm Kiefer said; and it is even harder if you are 4 or 5, live in different cities and have a family. That’s why, if you love somebody and want to stay close to him, having a band may be a good solution. I always suspected that Alterazioni Video was this kind of band, but the Turbo Films provided the final proof. The best way to understand Turbo Films is to consider them a relational trigger: they bring the band together, around a project that’s serious and involving enough to excite them, but not so much to make them freak out; they bring them to amazing places, put them in touch with a larger community they want to spend a good time with; they make them enjoy life together, while doing some art in the meantime. A movie is the perfect project for generating high quality social relations, both within the band and with the larger group of people that becomes the temporary film crew. A movie is a band art project by default: both at the level of writing, researching and planning, and at the time of acting, building the sets and recording, it can’t be the work of a one man band. It has always been like this, and in its early days — before the age of the film industry and of professionalism — it was produced in ways, and with motivations, that are very close to what Alterazioni Video calls Turbo Film. So, entertaining yourself (and others) and generating a feeling of togetherness, are fundamental preconditions for the making of a Turbo Film. Another core motivation is traveling, or better: enjoying and understanding a place in a way that is neither that of the resident, nor that of the tourist. It has been said — and I agree — that the main character of many Turbo Films is their location: be it Puerto Rico, New York, Berlin, Lampedusa, Milan, Giarre, Bandjoun or the Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia. I think that the starting point of most Turbo Films is not a narrative, but an idea such as: let’s do a party in Berlin! Or: let’s have an adventure in Puerto Rico! The film becomes the working framework that makes the party or the trip possible and the documentation, in fictional form, of what the artists discovers by launching that party or doing that trip. Of course, you can spend time together, launch a party or have a holiday without making a Turbo Film, but you can’t make a Turbo Film without setting up this situation of excitement, happiness, curiosity and exploration in advance. Simply, it doesn’t work. It has to be fun. By saying this, I’m not claiming that a Turbo Film is just an elaborate trick for having fun, and that there’s no value in the final output. Quite the contrary. The more fun the band (and the extended band of artist friends, improvised actors, local people) has, the more valuable the result.
The reason is simple. A Turbo Film is basically a tool of exploration, understanding and knowledge. Alterazioni Video understood that you can get much more of a situation, a community, a place by setting up a carnival-like situation, in which people get more relaxed and friendly, performance anxiety is put aside, and cultural differences are replaced by the basic human need to enjoy life together. They also understood that they are very good in doing it, and that they like it immensely. That’s why they don’t give too much importance to the script, they never do a scene twice, they casually mix together poor images and high quality footage and they change the movies after the first release, reworking the plot again and again. The making of the film does not have to interfere with the life situation they set up, because it’s actually the result of it. In this situation, production and distribution are not processes functional to the existence of a solid, final artifact which is the “artwork”; they are two out of three modes of existence of the artwork itself, one of which are the movies by Alterazioni Video. Before, the artwork exists as a life event, the making of. After, it exists as a… fuck, I run out of space. Let’s keep distribution for the next book. Just be sure: it has to be fun.
Sigarette Break, Arto Ushan and Andrea, Fred, Berlin, 2012
Turbo Memories: Interview by Davide Giannella to Alterazioni Video “What is genius? It is fantasy, intuition, determination and operating speed.’’ Amici Miei, 1974, Mario Monicelli The manifesto that you will find at the end of this publication is to be considered a useful tool to watch Turbo Films: a priori, on a theoretical level, it explicates premises and intentions, and once the watching is done, it allows the viewer to organize the visual and audio bombardment he has been put through as well as supplies a structure for any sort of future analysis. There is nonetheless a side of AV productions that, despite its importance, has not yet been described or investigated enough: that is, the life on the set of a Turbo Film. A collective performance in constant state of emergency, a flow in which the most different kinds of humanities are involved, ready to be stressed mentally and physically, in an eternal bacchanal with drugs, booze, cameras, hard disks, tutorial and sleepless nights in which everything melts into each other reaching a state of exhaustion. The following is the tale narrated by the main characters of these productions. The recording of an oral tale, consisting of foggy memories and prudish omissions which, by flowing simultaneously along with official scenic narration, unveils what it is actually like to be inside each and every Turbo Film, as it contributes to the creation of new mythologies. Now, that’s cinema! Davide: In 2012, as a background to the credits, a drunken clochard bare chest singing, along with his guitar, a song wrote by Giacomo only a few hours earlier. How did you meet him and more than that how did you convince him to take part in your film? Alterazioni Video: We were editing a Parisian film the night before the opening in a green office of the Kadist foundation. In the attempt to stay awake one of us had set off into the alleys of Montmartre in order to score some hash. Mission aborted. But he nevertheless got back with a guitar and two — alleged — ex-mercenaries from the French foreign Legion he met at some off license.. They were half gypsies and one had Sicily tattooed on his chest because he considered it to be the paradise on earth. Since we’ve spent some time in Sicily, we immediately realized that there was a little more to these corny words and after the first jug of wine, the dude starts talking. There were 5 dots of ink imbedded onto the map of flesh, each linked to a killing, perhaps a relative who got shot, all this as he was pouring some wine on the floor for his dead pals. He was a very nice geezer and by the third bottle we all started singing Sicilian songs we knew. By “vitti na crozza “ he started crying, we hugged and we shot the last scene of the movie. D: The filming of Fred took place in Berlin during the European football Cup. One night according to some, after Italy’s victory over Germany, to celebrate, you burgle a midget against a pretty big guy, cracking two of his ribs. Could you go a little bit more into detail with that story? AV: Chugging the midget was already roughly figured out in the plans for that sequence, basically we hired the guy just for that. The first day, when he came by our flat, someone with nonchalance asked him if we could throw him and he firmly replied that there was no problem at all since 80% of his job consisted of doing exactly that. Fuck Me! Turbo Casting With Davide Giannella, Berlin, 2012
Waiting For The Tsunami, Paololuca Barbieri Marchi and Matteo Erenbourg, New York, 2005
Thing is, midgets carry less blood than normal people. The specific weight of their bones marche ours, actually they are thicker, compact, but there is less blood, therefore they get drunk quicker. Peter, the midget, had a couple of pints with us and then using as an excuse Balotelli’s goal against Germany, he accepted to be hurled by a priest onto the lyrical meastro Ragnar Kjartansson. An epic moment... Ragnar fell and the midget landed with his hip onto Ragnar’s ribs, causing a rib fracture. Peter the midget ponded on his chest and howled. Balotelli! Ragnar told us that when he got to the E.R. they wouldn’t believe him until he lost it and screamed: a priest hurled a fucking midget at me cracking two of my ribs.. Now can I get some proper attention!! D: Talking about illegal substances, are they really a constant of you productions? Did they ever cause problems? AV: When you go around following stories and characters you simply realize that drugs are part of the world in which we live, whether they’re legal or not. We cross the world and we look at it for what it is. Sometimes we try to alter reality and make it more visionary but to do so, one doesn’t really need drugs all that much. During the production of Turbo Films there is a constant use of all sorts of things since the earliest hours of the day, the glitch is that most of the time half the budget is blown on alcohol and weed and then we’re left with very little to carry on the shooting of the movie and that’s when creativity really kicks in. I guess some people would actually define us con artists, and that’s an artist with an extra bit of flair. We could say that drugs are part of the drama, they can trigger situations inside and out of the set which in Turbo means pretty much the same thing. D: Does romance ever occur on the set? Who is the renown Pussy Magnet in Alterazioni Video? AV: The guy who scores is always the producer and the patron. In our particular case it would be the renown Andrea Sassi. He receives a couple of wedding pro position every movie. We don’t know how he pulls it off. We were thinking of making a movie about this phenomenon: Stone Fucking… lead character Sassi as it is. D: How did you manage to persuade a Russian curator and movie critic to stick the flag of his own country right up his ass? AV: Also this scene came out simply of nowhere. The previous day, at the Gay Pride, we met a very nice mistress who had her two slaves on the leash. We thought she was interesting, so we gave her an appointment by Giacomo’s house to involve her in some way or another, although at the time we had no idea how we were going to use her. She came in first, and slightly after her stunning entrance, there’s a knock on the door. It is a huge man we were all seeing for the very first time, basically a party crasher. As soon as he gets to the center of Giacomo’s living room, the center of the set, he strips of everything but a pair of shocking pink panties and a matching bra with black lace. We had to take charge of the situation which was starting to be embarrassing and we therefore decide to use this humongous brute and our Russian friend Arto as furniture, the first as a couch and the latter as a small table. The Russian flag we bought to use as a prop and it would’ve been a pity not to use it, in the shot we thought it looked pretty good up Arto’s ass. Dry Cleaning, Addis Abeba, 2014
D: When you meet people who have taken part in a Turbo Film, do they still speak to you? Has anyone sworn to avenge himself because of the experience he took part in? AV: Mostly they ask us for money. Others have asked us hospitality, others have taken advantage in bad ways. There was even a case of identity theft. When we’re on the set we promise all sorts of things to the misfortunate person who runs into us and then we have to keep faith to our promises. It’s a catch 22 type of situation. Last time we engaged an ordeal with Ethiopian bureaucracy in order to try to take two twin midgets from the Addis Abeba market and flight them to New York. We wanted them to attend our conference and we also wanted them to have a nice traveling experience. Winwin kind of situation. Unfortunately we realized that it is kind of hard to smuggle midgets holding no passports from Africa into the States, but we’ll give it another go in the future. Maybe we’ll go for albinos this time. D: Which was the biggest fight you had on a set? Did it ever become physical between you guys? AV: Once in Cameroon one of us had drank. Perhaps we all had though I don’t recall precisely. It had been a hell of a ride, like 16 hours on a minivan on white roads, people screaming, dried fish and the stink of gasoline. We get to the airport and the argument we were having was getting real heated. At this point we decided to give the issue a British sporting men sort of twist and things were to be settled onto the lawn in front of the airport. After a few minutes of this brawl with way too many injuries, we find ourselves bellies up and three AK’s of the local army pointed at us. We immediately got up and smiled friendly at the soldiers to simply limp back holding each other all the way to the gates: one to Beijing the other to New York. The nice thing about our fights is that when they occur the others relax and enjoy the show. I think that the biggest fight is yet to come, plenty lingering and unresolved matters and it would take a second trigger a laid back business meeting into a royal rumble hurling chairs at each other. D: Which was the most impressive location of a Turbo casting? AV: The casting is the clou moment of every Turbo Film. Basically we never stop trying to hire fresh meat for the set, up to the moment we’re about to walk onto the airplane runway that will take us to our respective homes. Among the epic casts at the super criticized Guggenheim Lab in Berlin during the shooting of Fred. The participants to the casting were being given a dental examination by Doctor Hajo Hantel, Gabriel von Loebell would analyze them in accurate psychiatric session, Don´t Puke would host them onto his rubber dinghy reminding them passages from the scripts, The Nice Music Arto and Mic Mazzari would take them to the recording studio for a singing try out and Rebecca Hall toned up their buttocks with an intensive Hola Hoop course. Also in a Ljubljana while trying to become part of history with a completely disastrous project: the making of a huge 750 kg Cevapcici. We were looking for a host to our performance and by chance we found a squat where they played metal music. Drunken long-haired guys pogoing hard beneath the stage. Towards the end of the night here comes on stage a good looking guy that, with an amazing chatter, managed to radically change the course of events. He managed to convince the metal audience that at first wanted to lynch him, to sing with him some really bad Slovenian pop songs. Within 15 minutes all those wasted men pogoing turned into loved up doves singing love songs with their lighters up. A genius. At that we thought we couldn’t go anyplace without that guy. As soon as he got off the stage we went to meet him, in a few minutes we managed to convince him to go buy a smoking at HM and he turned into an entertainer that not even Dean Martin…
Never Say Sorry, photo by Guido Gazzilli, Arto Ushan, Fred, Berlin, 2012
D: In order to film Hotel Milano you’ve come into contact with the Milanese Transgender Scene while to film FRED you’ve involved a professional from the Berlin BDSM world. Who were you more at ease with?
Paybacks A Bitch! Alberto Caffarelli and Abdel, photo Tamara Vignati, Paris, 2012
AV: The Berliner Dominatrixes have more testosterone than Milanese men and the Milanese Transgenders are more feminine than an average woman from Berlin... D: Surfing With Satoshi, had you deal with the Police of Puerto Rico. How did that story pan out? AV: We had a hell of a ride, a ram pickup 3500, along the coasts of the Isla Bonita. We generally cleaned up our act and most of us were sober as never before on a turbo set. Hair flowing in the wind, mirrored shades and hefty bulging pants in the cabin, some of us on the rear platform, we were enjoying ourselves while looking for our first scene. A police car with flashing lights nearly sends us of the road. Driver’s license, registration and gun to our heads. After glaring at us and backing off a few steps in order to have us all in shooting range: Policeman: What’re you doing in Puerto Rico? AV: Shooting a movie. Policeman: Porno? AV: No, Turbo Policeman: Oh Really? I’m officer Sneyder, I’m from New York, I’m a blues singer… He ended up with us driving his patrol car with sirens blasting and skidding along the white road clearings to re-enact a chasing scene. Not a bad singer either. D:How much money can you make on cock-fights? AV: Puerto Rico is filled with lost souls who in order to drink a six pack without having their old lady on their case, are ready to bet their whole salary/pension to the Cock Track exploiting poor animals. Davide I’d suggest you not to harbor high hopes on it. D: It seems, you have an attraction towards Midgets. AV: Actually they’re attracted to us. Up to this day we’ve worked with 5 midgets. It was never planned. I guess it is due to the fact that they’re natural born performers. When you’re a midget you’re practically forced to have a sense of humor and a great set of balls. Midgets yeah, but with balls the size of a fucking Gorilla! D: Who, among the singers and musicians, do you remember most dearly? AV: The most part of your front men I’ve been chosen because of their charisma and only secondly due to their singing abilities. Generosity, presence of mind, availability, and patience are key to a Turbo interpreter whether we’re dealing with a pro or an amateur. We’ll never forget Trix Sepots, our mechanic priest in front of the mike and leader of our Band a Bandjun, Juni Radames Figueroa, on his first (and unforgettable) appearance with “El Chata” in Puerto Rico, Ragnar Kjartansson tireless turbo artist 360° and the maestros Pete Drungle and Michelangelo Mazzari who have the ability to transform anything they touch into an exquisite melody and all the other that we’re not going to mention because we’d need a lot more space but they’ve nonetheless spent sleepless nights in order to have us go back to our homes with our own original soundtrack, really original. D: Better to play football in Camerun or volleyball at the Trotter Park of Milano? Who is the most athletic of you guys? Virgin Blood, Giacomo Porfiri, Lampedusa, 2010
AV: There is the early bird mid-distance runner and the Johnny Walker…
Notes From An Inside Man Filippo Anniballi Well, I am pretty sure all five members of Alterazioni Video have had their say in this wonderful little book of theirs. What a load of malarkey. I know what goes on a Turbo Film, what kind of depravation and mischief. I am the hit-man on my good days, but more often than not, I am the gimp. Remember the guy in the leather outfit with the rubber thingy in his mouth in “Pulp Fiction”. “Bring out the gimp…” “The gimp’s sleeping…” “Well I guess you better go and wake him up then…” I have been called upon to harass classy audiences during Performa. I emptied the minibar of the suite we were performing in, and shared it with the crowd. I played the priest who hurled midgets, well actually just one midget. I babbled my head in the unbearable heat of Lampedusa, I did the Karaoke naked with Peaches and Artò Ushan. I pretended to be Peter Popham, the Independent correspondent. I seriously put some real pressure not so much on myself as on my liver. I’m the last resort. What the fuck are we going to do with this performance? Let’s call Filippo Anniballi, get him on a plane, give him chump change and unlimited amounts of booze and see what he pulls off. I’m telling I never had so much fun nor felt so much pain like touring with these bastards. My asset is the fact that I’m bilingual, I’m a half-assed writer and I look good with my wayfarers on. If there is an Alterazioni Video gig of some sort, three out of five you’ll see me in the background with my Ramones t-shirt, beer in front of me, pretending to write something on my Moleskine. I share with Paololuca Barbieri Marchi an interest, well it’s more like a fixation over midgets; with Jack Porfiri an inclination towards debauchery, with Andrea Masu a fondness for Hunter S. Thompson, with Alberto Caffarelli a lifelong friendship and with Matteo Erenbourg a fetish for Hawaiian shirts. I think I nearly died a couple of times. I experienced the so called Lazarus effect during takes. How often can you say that on a regular set? Fuck, all seems to be the correct figure… I am not a nice person. I’m probably a masochist too. Bad combination when you work with a bunch of sadists. Of course I like to take the piss from time to time, and Alterazioni Video have provided me with many chances to do so. From the Italian Minister of culture to Peaches, it has been a hell of a ride. Why Turbo? Because you’ll travel the world, most likely you’ll increase your chances to get some weird exotic virus and meet wonderful people (people that aren’t AV, or me for all that counts). I’ve said several times that I’d be proud to die on a Turbo Film set. The craziest thing about Turbo Films? They’re like an Ouija Board, you never know where they will fucking take you. My favorite scene? Of course it was one that didn’t make it through editing, I was the priest and I was selling heroin close to Kottbusser Tor in Berlin. Obviously I was pretending to sell smack, but at some point a bunch of real junkies came over and asked to score. A priest selling junk? Yep. They fell for it. That is how damn absurd a Turbo set can be. Also pretty convincing I might add. I am getting old, I wonder if at forty I should ever be allowed on a Turbo set ever again. Thing is, when the phone rings, my hand starts itching and I simply don’t have enough balls to say no to another rollercoaster ride… Not Sure If’s Chocolate or Shit, Fred, Berlin, 2012
Lost In The Jungle, Andrea Masu, Turbo Bingo, New York, 2014
Turbo Film And The Uncertain Future Of Moving Images Alterazioni Video Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Giacomo Porfiri, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu. alterazionivideo@gmail.com www.alterazionivideo.com Image cover: All My Friends Are Dead, 2009 Designed by: Alterazioni Video Edited by: Alterazioni Video Produced by: Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Dispari&Dispari Project Texts by: Marc Augè, Filippo Anniballi, Artemis Baltoyanni, Eric Banks, Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Ivan Bargna, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Davide Giannella, Kristine Knox, Matteo Lucchetti, Marco Mancuso, Andrea Masu, Andrew Neel, Matteo Pavesi, Rita Pinto, Giacomo Porfiri, Domenico Quaranta, Andrea Sassi, Marco Scotini, Phil Sick, Wolfgang Staehle, Arto Ushan. The unsigned texts in this book are taken from the doctoral research ‘Turbo Film As Apparatus And The Future Of Moving Images’ by Paololuca Barbieri Marchi. Photos by: Alterazioni Video, Luca Babini, Tamara Vignati, Guido Gazzilli, Elisa Giardina Papa, Alessandro Magi, Luigi Scarcella, Andrea Sassi. © 2016 logo fausto lupetti editore via del Pratello, 31 - 40122 Bologna tel. +39 051 5870786 viale Abruzzi, 84 - 20131 Milano tel. +39 02 36536238 www.faustolupettieditore.it EAN 978-88-6874-125-9
Copyright 2016 Alterazioni Video All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the authors.
Special Thanks: David Adamo, Alessandro Alemani, Vera Alemani, Iris Alonzo, Francesco Alvino, Nathalie Angles, Filippo Anniballi, Uri Aran, Roy Ascott, Marc Augè, Sarah Avolio, Luca and Teo Babini, Trisha Baga, Artemis Baltoyanni, Eric Banks, Ivan Bargna, Marco Barsottini, Raoul Beltrame, Felice Benoit, Jeff Bosh, Peter Brownbill, Adam Budak, Olmo and Nina Caffarelli, Fabrizio Caffarelli, Valentina Campari, Pierluigi Cappucci, Antonio Caronia, Pasquale CMB, Cristiano Cesolari, Dov Charney, Stefano Chiovini, Arthur Colombini, Camila Cruz, Claudia D’Aita, Giovanni De Donà, Pedro Delbrey, Shoma Dore, Luca Matteo Di Meo, Pete Drungle, Thomas Elsaesser, Yeshi Eklund, Sara Eklund, Tito and Petra Erenbourg, Juni Radames Figueroa, Guido Gazzilli, Giovanna Giannattasio, Davide Giannella, Elisa Giardina Papa, Bodo Gottschalk, Alex Grazioli, Carol Green, Rebecca Halls, Hajo Hantel, Joe Hill, Heater Hubbs, Irene Isnardi, Abdallah Kezouit, Ragnar Kjartansson, Adam Kleinmann, Blaize Lehane, John Lion, Pietro Lucerni, Silvia Lucchesi, Matteo Lucchetti, Alessandro Magi, Marco Mancuso, Eva Mattes, Michelangelo Mazzarri, Sofia Mehiel, Mine Minelli, Mokless, Luca Molinari, Francesco Monico, Vittorio Montresoro, Hartely Neel, Diego Pascal Panarello, Cristina Piccinelli, Rita Pinto, Carlo Pratis, Matteo Prudenziati, Emanuela Puma, Adelaida Ortiz, Domenico Quaranta, Gianni e Rosanna Sassi, Luigi Scarcella, Trix Sepots, Enrico Sgarbi, Einar Snorri, Freddy Spaghetti, Wolfgang Staehle, Robert Storr, Giovanni Trabucco, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Tamara Vignati, Mike and Andra Ursuta, Aro Ushan, Veronika, Gabriel Von Loebell, Marcus Wolf, Viola Yesiltac, Yuri, Marco Zanuso, Zezza. Also Thanks to: Comune di Giarre, Contro Progetto, Cooperativa Muratori Braccianti Di Carpi, NABA, Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Greene Naftali Gallery, Guggenheim Lab, Kadist Foundation, Amica, Schermo dell’Arte, Karo Tribe, Milano Film Festival, Cairo Film Festival, Nada New York, Operativa Arte Contemporanea, Performa New York, Ramiken Crucible Gallery, Schermo dell’Arte, Vanity Project, SeeThink. Very special thanks to: Matteo Pavesi, Andrea Sassi and Dispari&Dispari Project