"On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its first presentation at ACMI – Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne in December 2015, Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto will be presented at XNL Piacenza – Center for Contemporary Art, Cinema, Theater, and Music of the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano, in collaboration with the publishing house Electa. The exhibition is the 25th institutional presentation of the film installation. The work is a powerful tribute to the practice of the 20th-century artistic manifesto: programmatic and assertive texts through which artists declared a break with the past, outlining – in incisive and poetic words – a new vision of art, a mirror of a world in transformation.
The German artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt (Munich, 1965), conceived Manifesto in 2015 as a series of thirteen short films, each set in a different context and masterfully performed by the Australian actress Cate Blanchett. Blanchett embodies thirteen characters – twelve women and one man – who recite texts composed of collages of manifestos belonging to as many artistic movements. The choice to entrust the roles to female figures, Rosefeldt explains, stems from the desire to rebalance a cultural history traditionally dominated by male voices. The artist has described Manifesto as a kind of act of faith in the possibility of changing the world through the power of shared words.
The work is based both on a refined visual construction – with frequent use of aerial shots, a stylistic hallmark of the artist – and on in-depth historical research on locations and texts. The recited texts are drawn from more than fifty manifestos from the 20th century, belonging to movements in the visual arts, dance, architecture, literature, and cinema. The installation as a whole raises questions rather than offering answers, rejecting any dogmatic stance. The texts selected by Rosefeldt, often written by young authors driven by fervor and rupture, call for “vital disorder,” “raw energy,” and the abolition of the past, projecting themselves into the heart of the present. But how do these words resonate today, when juxtaposed with the everyday life of a homeless woman, a housewife, a worker, a punk singer, or a teacher?
Manifesto is a work commissioned by ACMI – Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover; co-produced by the Burger Collection in Hong Kong and the Ruhrtriennale; realized with the generous support of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg in collaboration with Bayerischer Rundfunk.
The XNL Art program is promoted by Rete Cultura Piacenza, which includes Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano, Comune di Piacenza, Provincia di Piacenza, Regione Emilia-Romagna, Camera di Commercio dell’Emilia, and the Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio. The project is accompanied by a series of public events dedicated to exploring the themes raised by the work, as well as a publication by Electa, conceived as a tool for engaging with the manifestos cited in Julian Rosefeldt’s work."
Curated by Paola Nicolin