Welcome to our fourth episode. Our guest today is Davide Giannella.
Davide is an independent curator. His research focuses on the potential relationships between the art system and various spheres of the contemporary cultural landscape, as well as on the translation and adaptation of artistic projects and content across different contexts and platforms.
GG
I you have a particular interest in moving images and their relations with art and cinema. Let’s start from there.
DG
It’s true: I have been, and continue to be, very interested in moving images, as well as in images in a broader sense, in sound, in music — really in any form of expression. I often speak of it in the past tense simply because, at a certain point, I had the sense that I no longer had much to add to their interpretation. Not because the subject had exhausted its potential — quite the opposite, I think it still has a great deal — but because personally I was starting to feel confined within that specific field.
I’ve always tried to question the possibilities for development of these languages, their declinations, their translations. Because, fundamentally, the underlying theme is narrative. We’re used to thinking of narrative works as cinema, in its most classical and industrial sense, or as literary fiction. I, on the other hand, believe every work is narrative: a song, a visual work, anything at all. We ourselves are constructed through narratives, and, more and more often, even industry sells narratives above all, rather than content or products in themselves.
That’s why I remain very interested in narratives and in the way they get translated from one language to another, from one medium to another. In an almost banal way: the story of Hansel and Gretel remains substantially the same in its structure whether it’s told in German, Italian, or French. I believe there’s enormous potential here, especially today, now that production techniques have become, thanks to technology, far more accessible to artists and authors than they used to be.
At one time, cinema or a music production required enormous resources. For roughly the last twenty years, however, access has progressively broadened — not just to production tools, but to the entire chain: pre-production, production, and distribution, which remains the most complex node even today. Still, digital platforms and new distribution channels have profoundly changed the rules of the game, making it possible to produce and spread content to far more people.
GG
It used to take a huge amount of energy to produce content. Now that it takes much less, does the work lose value?
DG
I don’t think it’s that simple. On one hand, I see enormous potential in the capacity to express content: if you have something worth saying and manage to turn it into an audiovisual work, a sound piece, or an editorial project, you suddenly have access to far more channels and platforms through which that content can reach different audiences.
At the same time, all the different threads that make up an author’s path can branch out with much more freedom. Someone might encounter a piece of content through a book, and then discover there’s also a film, or an album, connected to the same project. They’re not the same thing: each language keeps its own grammar. But that discovery can spark interest toward that other context, that other language, generating new kinds of audiences. Not so much through hybridization as through interweaving, which I consider a very different and very important concept.
Hybridization risks flattening content, diluting it. One example, from my point of view, is brand collaborations — the “collab” format. A collaboration used to imply a genuine mutual investment between two parties building something together. Today it’s very often just mystification: an attempt to renew something that, on its own, can no longer hold up.
In art, however, forms of interweaving can occur that I consider genuinely useful and necessary. Today, as has actually always been possible, different languages can be mixed and interwoven so that content is amplified. But it’s important that the individual threads remain recognizable. Like a braided rope: there’s a red strand, a green one, a blue one; even though they’re wound together, you can still tell them apart.
Too often, though, behind the idea of total multidisciplinarity, the differences end up dissolving. I believe strongly in encounters, especially liminal ones: situations in which different contexts come into relation, crossing over and overlapping at the edges. That’s also why I’ve always been interested in the way moving images coming out of the art world progressively took on narrative characteristics, trying then to enter the system of cinema, and vice versa.
Every cultural system periodically needs new stimuli. As a curator, I find it genuinely exciting to go looking for things that are still poorly defined, situations capable of producing new meanings.
GG
Have you come across anything like that lately?
DG
That’s a difficult question to deal with. The older you get, the more baggage of experience you carry, and the harder it becomes to come across something that truly feels unprecedented. Then again, probably even what once seemed completely new to us wasn’t really new.
If I had to point to one field, though, I’d say music. Right now I’m extremely interested in it because it seems to keep renewing its own meaning. I think that’s due to how much more accessible things are today, and also to the fact that, more than other art forms, music today still manages to build community around itself.
Music also keeps a very strong relationship with community, and it recovers many cultural — or subcultural — scenes that today are appealing again, especially to people younger than me. There was an almost nostalgic phase among people born between the late nineties and the early two-thousands: a nostalgia for something they had, in fact, never actually experienced. And something similar can be found in even younger generations, the ones we could call fully digital native. In German you’d say Sehnsucht; an artist like Riccardo Benassi has named this feeling Morestalgia.
There used to be grand narratives that offered fairly rigid structures, almost orthogonal grids. Today we’ve entered a kind of alter-modernity, to use Nicolas Bourriaud’s term: we came out of postmodernism rather battered. There are positive aspects, like an extraordinary circularity, but the scales of value all need to be redefined, rethought. It’s a much more complex situation. I like it as a condition, but circularity inevitably produces negative reactions too. Everywhere, xenophobic or conservative impulses are strengthening precisely because disorientation is increasing: fear of the other, fear of complexity. We see it in global politics, but also in everyday life, when people sense that “something doesn’t add up” and react in the worst possible way.
That said — and I notice this while teaching — the generation born in the early two-thousands lives with technology with genuine serenity, free of obsessions. Paradoxically, I see far more anxiety in our own generation, at least in the Western context.
Gen Z pays attention without anxiety. It doesn’t experience the frustration of feeling continuously excluded from something. There’s no hypocrisy, no need to deliberately get lost. After all, there’s always a phone. Rather, if the phone runs out of battery, then you really do get lost — but by accident, not by choice.
The previous generation, on the other hand, was still inside that dynamic where you’d tell yourself: “Today I’m going out without my phone.” That was still a conscious, almost performative gesture, which ended up stripping away the spontaneity of actually getting lost.
The problem is that this apparent security has produced further frustration. The world is increasingly precarious. I see it too in the way younger people are rediscovering, with great naturalness, what we used to call subcultures.
Music, again, is a good example. Electronic music culture is born precisely in that period, with roots reaching back into the fifties. It was, among other things, the aesthetic translation of an industrial crisis: techno, and the secular ritual of the rave, which often took shape slowly inside abandoned industrial spaces.
I think our generation has worn down — or perhaps consolidated — a certain distance between people. It’s not entirely technology’s fault, but technology has certainly oversimplified things: that “so close, yet so far.” If I can communicate with you remotely, quickly and precisely, why should I actually meet you?
Then COVID arrived, feeding fears and establishing new habits. I have the impression that, at the level of the collective unconscious, that experience still hasn’t really been processed. It was repressed almost immediately, and I find that dangerous. Without in any way diminishing the real losses that occurred, I think that, psychologically, it was a collective wound that never went through a genuine process of mourning. We simply acted as if nothing had happened.
GG
What do you think happened after COVID?
DG
I think the first response, or perhaps the first attempt to move past the condition produced jointly by technological development and COVID, was a genuine desire to be together again. In that sense, I think artistic expressions were one of the strongest engines in the construction of community — producing very broad shared imaginaries, capable of influencing wider culture and turning into shared systems of value.
That’s also why I remain interested in performance: in a certain sense it brings me back to cinema. The moving image, in its most essential form, is already an unfolding in time, and, above all, it still forces you to leave the house to really experience it. A documented performance, if it doesn’t involve live participation, loses much of its value. Documenting it remains important, but from that point on it becomes something else, an autonomous work, just like cinema.
A film screening imposes a rhythm on the viewer. You can’t pause it, step out for a cigarette, and then pick up where you left off. When the film ends, you inevitably forget certain details and perform your own mental edit, retaining only what struck you most. And yet, during the viewing, you remain alone. Even sitting next to someone, even next to your own family, you remain essentially silent. At most you might kiss someone or eat popcorn, but you don’t really interact with the person beside you.
GG
No, exactly.
DG
And it’s interesting, because many directors, understandably, wish every screening felt like a collective event, almost a shared party. After all, cinema is also born from that impulse, even though it partly derives from theatre and other forms of staged representation. And that’s exactly where performance becomes so interesting.
GG
It’s interesting to think of performance as a continuation of the narrative of the moving image. And, in some way, also as the inevitable reminder that all of us, ultimately, are performers. Watching a performance might be a mirror of the way we consume our own lives today.
DG
More poser than performer, maybe. Even though posing is itself a form of performance. A rather sad form, I’d say. Maybe the worst one.
For better or worse it’s one of the defining traits of our time. How consciously a person chooses to take on that posture probably depends on their personal history. What I notice above all is a widespread awareness of precariousness.
In its glossier, almost yuppie version, this precariousness translates into the idea of being an “entrepreneur of oneself.” That’s also a positive attitude — and technically we really are that — but with equal precision we could simply call it precariousness. All of this is closely tied to the collapse of industry: the working class has progressively transformed into a cultural, creative class, and, not by chance, we’re witnessing the disappearance of the middle class across much of the West, while in China the opposite is happening, and the middle class has been growing for over fifteen years.
I think there is, then, an increasingly widespread performativity that can easily slide into posing, fed above all by the absence of security — economic, but not only — that people struggle to build even within themselves.
In the context of art, though, I consider this a kind of happy accident. Performance is a beautiful expressive form that, ironically, has very little market.
GG
Because it’s hard to sell?
DG
Exactly. The author, the interpreter, the performer sells something even more ephemeral than the content itself: the fetishized trace of an experience that nevertheless has its own concreteness. It’s a pure experience.
GG
I imagine it’s also hard to collect.
DG
Yes, although fortunately there are economic systems that support this field and allow those who produce these works not to live in permanent precariousness.
GG
It makes me think of a friend of mine. When she started working with performance, found this device: the objects she used during the performance would then become what remained of the work, her “props,” the residue.
DG
That’s something that’s been done very often, but I’m a little wary when people lean too heavily on props: they risk becoming a shortcut.
I’m not talking about her specific case. I was thinking more of cinema, when props are kept as objects. That’s a form of total fetishization. The object becomes a mere surrogate: “this is the fire extinguisher Will Ferrell touched in that scene,” when in reality you probably just bought it at the hardware store down the street.
But coming back to the actual point: I think you can produce genuine declinations, or translations, of the same content, with formal autonomy and intrinsic value — not as a surrogate.
GG
Are you working right now on anything that moves in the direction of what we’ve been discussing?
DG
Yes, I hope so... One experiment comes to mind that I think worked well, shortly after COVID, realized during Miart and set in the Salone d’Onore of Triennale Milano, with the artists Riccardo Benassi and Michele Rizzo. The project unfolded in three acts, Michele–Riccardo–Michele, a format that in many ways was unprecedented, sitting in a liminal zone between choreography, a DJ set, a video projection, and an essay, a lecture, and a rave.
What interests me is that it doesn’t really ask for a response to a “product” as such. I’m more interested in working through facets than through structures, because, as they say, when you work with new media, in the end you’re always working with media. The interesting part is how the different elements interlock with one another thanks to the different human components involved — the artists, the audience, the institution, myself... It was a good project.
Even more recently, some exhibitions in collaboration with the collective Specific (Andrea Sala, Patrick Tuttofuoco, and Forniture Pallotta), who handle the lighting design of the projects, at the exhibition space of BiM in Bicocca. In these cases I was able to work a great deal on the idea of the exhibition as a format, revisiting and experimenting with it. I was interested in reconsidering and questioning certain exhibition conventions and curatorial approaches. What came out of it were, at least for me, fairly successful projects, because I think they were good narratives: Le Luci e Gli Amanti, Incarnato, and, just this past month, Paper/Northern Light, which is a revival and recontextualization of a 1971 work by Gianni Pettena.
GG
How did you get there?
DG
It had already been realized once before, in 1971, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Gianni was supposed to give a lecture on space, and one day he had the classroom filled entirely with identical strips of paper hung from the ceiling down to the floor. Then he handed out scissors to the students and simply said: “Now create your own space.”
From there, a reflection opened up on what space really is: on the relationship between a given, normed, orthogonal, functional space, and an emotional space, created autonomously, partly unconsciously and partly rationally, and on how these two dimensions can find a balance.
It’s beautiful to see how the work transforms over time. A new relationship forms between the strips that remain intact — still vertical, orthogonal, rational, modern — and those that instead take on completely unpredictable, almost chaotic shapes, but which, precisely because of that, end up balancing one another out, producing a very strong, very positive relationship between the parts.
The original work is called Mid-Western Ocean: the installation ended up creating something reminiscent of waves.
GG
Yes, also because of the way the sheets fell. They had a genuinely oceanic quality.
DG
Exactly. And what made it particularly interesting to me, and particularly relevant today, is that it reflects something Gianni has always done. He trained as an architect and was one of the founders of Radical Architecture, together with Branzi, the UFO group, and the whole story of the so-called Florentine School. But while the others subverted the grammar of architecture from within, still ultimately practicing architecture, even if in extremely experimental forms, Gianni never practiced architecture a single day in his life. He always worked exclusively as an artist. His attitude was: if we’re going to make a mess, then let’s really make one.
This touches on something I care about deeply: the idea that art presupposes a form of freedom such that it becomes a territory any other discipline can pass through — especially the more undisciplined ones, the ones that struggle most to find space, or simply to breathe, within their own field.
For me it’s always been a fundamental example. Not by chance, one of the very first artists who truly struck me, from a young age, was Gordon Matta-Clark: his ability to move across so many different fields, starting from architecture, working on architectural space, but always as an artist.
Today we’ve reached extremely high levels of standardization — speaking both of artists and of curators — because the system is economically fragile. It’s a system on the defensive, seeking certainties, seeking safe choices. And this produces a progressive extinction of stimuli, a progressive extinction of innovation, when instead innovation should be the primary engine of everything we do.
I wouldn’t want to sound too critical. On a general level, any system needs to defend itself at least in part, or it collapses. But it’s also up to curators, artists, and everyone working in this field to genuinely believe in it and put something of their own into it. I’m not interested in complaining about “the system,” because we ourselves are fully part of the system.
GG
Is it a form of ongoing contestation?
DG
Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s really a contestation. If there’s one thing I do, it’s respond first of all to a need of my own. Maybe it’s a form of laziness, but I always start from the same question: what’s missing for me? And then, almost as a bet, I ask myself whether that lack might resonate with someone else too, whether the attempt to fill that gap for myself might also intercept someone else’s interest or pleasure.
That’s also why a 1971 work becomes plausible again today. That Pettena piece, in fact, exists only through participation. The strips of paper take shape only once the public begins cutting them, creating their own space. And even though each person performs that gesture individually — perhaps completely alone, in that instant — they still become part of a collective manipulation of the work. The work exists only as a function of that collective gesture.
For me this had a very strong meaning, especially in a city like Milan today, although I think it’s a fairly universal, global condition. It’s tied to many urgent issues in the West: the housing crisis, for example; the scarcity of public space; the question of autonomous, self-managed, or occupied spaces, which today is often softened with the phrase “social spaces.” These are extremely urgent themes, and I think a 1971 work — even though going back to the past isn’t something I do often — can still speak meaningfully to the present. If it manages to resonate today, that’s what matters.
There’s also a small irony: this work, in its complete form, had never been realized in Italy. And, honestly, I’ve never really understood why.
GG
I like the idea of “recovery.” Normally we’re all a bit wary of the simple gesture of taking something from the past and putting it back into circulation, but maybe today it’s precisely that gesture that takes on meaning.
DG
Yes, I think so too. I think it depends partly on an attitude, partly on a certain kind of path. For example, if you open YouTube as a completely new, unregistered user...
GG
You mean a virgin algorithm?
DG
Let’s say so, though there’s probably some trick underneath. But imagine typing in something, opening the first result, and then scrolling through the column of recommended videos. In that “virgin” state you might find yourself looking at an old wartime newsreel of a bombing in England, right next to a tutorial on how to singe your nose hair, then an Elvis video, and so on.
The device reflects exactly the reality we live in. Our own reality, by now, is structured the same way: it’s up to us to build whatever connections we want between completely different things.
If there’s one small advantage our generation still holds over younger ones, it’s that we still have some tool of comparison, some minimal scale of values, some way of telling one thing apart from another. Because if you approach the stream of content without discrimination, everything ends up flattened onto the exact same plane.
This completely overturns the perspective. And I’ve tried to bring it into an exhibition, because an exhibition, too, is ultimately a device: a set of signs, just like the ones scrolling on a screen, connected to one another both sensorially and unconsciously, and rationally, through the connections the mind constructs.
If you put all of this together — a Caravaggio next to a Gordon Matta-Clark, next to a Dan Graham — how effective is that at producing meaning?
It’s up to me to understand what each of these elements means and what discourse they build together. That’s something I find fascinating: having the possibility, or the freedom, to commission works without demanding that they immediately produce a single, unambiguous meaning. As long as what you’re doing is contemporary, you’re still moving in some direction, even if you don’t know exactly which one.
For me that’s exactly the interesting part. It generates movement because it generates meaning, through your own personal alphabet, your own language. Because, ultimately, language is the personal way each of us constructs our own sentences, thinks our own thoughts.
Naturally, if you limit yourself to mounting exhibitions of deceased artists already fully legitimized by the market and the public — therefore extremely “safe” — without ever questioning the intrinsic value of those works, or the way they’re re-staged (which is by no means a given, since staging too requires continuous innovation), then that narrative thread ends up becoming too reassuring, especially if you keep repeating it endlessly.
At the same time, it would be equally wrong to claim that anything produced more than ten years ago isn’t automatically contemporary. That’s a judgment that no longer holds up today. The contemporary is everything that exists in the present and, above all, everything that builds relationships, proposals, and orchestrations between past and present.
GG
Do you think art still has the strength to make proposals, in an age that leans more and more toward simplification and categorization? And that it can still work on form, beyond content?
DG
From the point of view of formalization, personally I’d lean toward something more abstract, rather than a kind of imitation of current events. But yes, I think art can still do it.
I think one of the main mistakes — made partly by institutions themselves, or in any case by anyone who needs immediate legitimation from the public — is forgetting that institutions aren’t necessarily bad or conservative. They need funding, they have to deal with ministries, they have to hold together a whole set of very complex aspects. It’s a complex system, and often, for that very reason, a delicate one, if not a fragile one.
Everyone talks about culture as a fundamental pleasure, but in reality the people who produce it are relatively few. Not because they’re better than everyone else, but because choosing that path inevitably means giving up other possibilities.
Culture isn’t really about erudition. It’s about values, about the capacity to share and organize them. It can be produced in many different ways, and it will keep being produced regardless, because it responds to a genuine need.
It’s not even a question of scale. Things start small and then grow. What matters is the moment they become shared, when they truly manage to produce value.
That said, I’m not naive. It’s clear that good and bad exist, in a very concrete sense too. But I think it’s worth looking for different ways of telling these things, leaving room also for a dimension of pleasure, not only for “justice.” That’s the risk I mentioned before: treating the public as if it weren’t capable of understanding on its own, as if it constantly needed to be catechized.
GG
For too long, art has been subjected to the public’s attempt to “understand” it. This mechanism today seems to demand too much out of people.
DG
Maybe it was modernity that built a somewhat elitist frame around all of this.
Think about cinema. My grandmother used to come to my exhibitions and tell me: “Nice... but I didn’t understand it.” “Nice” because she loved me, of course, but there was always that hesitation, that filter tied to the need to “understand.”
If instead you took my grandmother to the cinema — whether it was some ordinary comedy or a Herzog film — she’d come out and simply tell you whether she liked it or not. Because cinema, as a language, has become accessible enough to make anyone feel entitled to have an opinion.
That said, one shouldn’t be anxious about the goal that art must please or interest everyone, that it must be accessible at all costs. In fact, I think art is for whoever wants it.
Today, though, we’re almost at the opposite extreme. Through social media everyone has an opinion about everything, instantly. And that, honestly, I find dangerous.
GG
The problem of “understanding,” though, works in both directions. There’s also the opposite side: that of jargon.
DG
Yes, that’s true. There have been entire eras — the seventies, for instance — when perhaps overly rigid interpretive systems were applied to everything: psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, and so on. It held true for art, for architecture, for medicine.
But at least they offered people a relatively simple narrative, a thread to hold on to.
Today it’s harder. And, honestly, even in this very conversation of ours, we’ve mentioned things neither of us has really explained fully.
Personally, that doesn’t bother me. If anything, not understanding something can be a stimulus.
Of course, I can’t be completely oblivious: I at least need to know how to “open the door,” so to speak. But I always try to make the relationship with the public plausible.
What genuinely worries me, though, is something much more specific. For example, when you hear that certain publishers were reportedly asked for a kind of “certificate of anti-fascism” in order to have their own stand at a fair.
I believe deeply in anti-fascism as a foundational value. But you can’t go around asking people for a “certificate” to prove it. Paradoxically, that is already the first fascist gesture: the imposition of that kind of bureaucratic normativity.
These short-circuits genuinely frighten me because they always work through a polarizing dynamic. We all risk falling into it, in an almost childish way, because collectively, and even unconsciously, we’re a bit orphaned of real points of reference.
People say fascists are nostalgic for the Mussolini era. And, in part, that’s certainly true. But really, everyone is nostalgic for security, in the more general sense of clear things.
Even the idea of total anarchy can, for some, represent its own form of security, of inner calm.
GG
Do you think there’s such a thing as a good nostalgia and a bad nostalgia?
DG
I don’t think you can really escape nostalgia. Sooner or later it catches up with everyone. But it needs to be kept under control, especially in our field, otherwise you simply stop producing anything new.
Looking back is perfectly fine, as long as that past gets processed and brought back into the present, in relation to something not yet defined, something capable of generating new things, third things.
But nostalgia really is a dangerous feeling. It’s deeply tied to looking backward, and it can become a force that guides you without your really noticing. You can lose your bearings, because there’s something leading you without your knowing precisely anymore where you stand.
Moreover, history and memory are very often confused with each other. Memory is steeped in nostalgia, while history should at least try to be more objective, to free itself of that feeling.
It sounds almost inhuman to say one should never feel nostalgic. And yet I think it really is a dangerous feeling. It’s reductive, and it stops you from truly looking at the present — let alone the future.
And the present matters.
GG
Present is a good place to be, isn’t it?
DG
Yes, exactly. And that, too, is ultimately a form of nostalgia.
It connects back to what I was saying earlier about “safe” choices — exhibiting only extraordinary artists who, however, are already dead, for instance. There’s nothing wrong with the artists themselves, obviously. But from a curatorial point of view it becomes a bit dangerous if you’re never willing to take a risk, if you’re never willing to grant at least some openness — and even a certain tolerance for the possibility of failure — toward the public. Otherwise nothing new is ever born, nothing really ever happens.
The same holds for culture in general. If we just keep confirming what people already know and already accept, then it’s over. Development has to come from somewhere. And, at a broader, institutional level, that’s exactly the social and educational role institutions should have.
If you only ever feed a child baby food, they’ll never develop a taste for anything else. And even as an adult, if for fifteen years you’ve been fed the same flavor, you’ll keep wanting only that.
It’s the same with content and with expressive languages.
Fortunately, no one is born already knowing how to live an aesthetic experience. At first it’s something sensory, unconscious. And it’s a good thing that this experience can later be reorganized rationally, because that’s exactly how the desire to go deeper is born, once something has really moved you.
But there should also be room, and even a sense of ease, in saying: “I understood absolutely nothing.” Not because you’re stupid, but precisely because of that, you go and ask someone. Maybe that person introduces you to the artist, who tells you something more. Or maybe it’s the artist himself who says: “Look, I don’t know either.” And that’s fine too.
That’s how communities are formed: people who want to be together and build something. And, all things considered, that doesn’t seem like a bad outcome at all.
Hope you enjoyed :)
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Great interview.