Interview: Artoldo
Luca Curci talks with Sara Ferro and Chris Weil during CONTEMPORARY VENICE 2021, at The ROOM Contemporary Art Space and Palazzo ALbrizzi-Capello.

ARTOLDO is a creative collective featuring the Film Directors and New Media Artists Sara Ferro and Chris Weil, with a focus on Audiovisual Shows, Cinebitions, Avant-garde/Experimental films, Expanded Cinema, Moving Images and Video Art installations. “With our art we would like to discover the undiscovered. Pointing to the hidden meaning of the unknown. Exploring the subconscious by filtering the conscious’ limits of the physical world. Crossing the borders to new worlds restricted by systems and crusted structures. Aiming for an altered state of mind. Art should help to rebuild the dying world fracked by the parasites of the past. Art should free the mind by coloring the black and whites of polarism. Art should be a transformation of history within the present towards the future. Our art is progressive. It wants to recreate itself, hunting its own fairy tales. As we are all living our personal loops, our goal is to control them. To play and remix them. To modulate them by creating dynamics and emotions. Creating peace and silence by speeding up. Generating speed by slowing down. The opposites are our friends and enemies. The secret of our art is: we do not want to make art. We want to destroy it. By burning down the frames we will be able to inhale the toxic smoke of our social media garbage society. We are all suffering from pixel pollution. The inner self is raped by selfies every day. The followers and likes are the heroin that is floating our venes to creating holograms of a brave new world. A matrix of illusions and addictions. A projection of desires that we will never reach because they are not meant to come true. When a lie covers a lie to cover up the failure of a rotten ground, it stinks. Everything will fall apart. It does not help anymore to break the walls as we are already broken. The pandemic is not the end, it is the beginning of a slow but painful change. But will art help to heal the wounds of an injured generation?

Luca Curci – What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
Artoldo – As a duo, our background is multifarious, encompassing a pro video editing television broadcast experience and a master in sociology, skills in the antiquarian trade and knowledge of the fashion system, poetry slam engagement and literary translation, new media programming and net art inspirations.

LC – How did you get to your current artistic practice?
AR – All this has merged in the first place in form of subject matters and topics, in a word “contents” in our enterprise as filmmakers, writers and directors for cultural documentary films and then unfolded its full potential as “form” and “aesthetics” in the field of experimental filmmaking, feature and short, moving images and video art.

LC – Do you use art to express something in particular? Is it like your medium of expression?
AR – Art is for us a tool and device for getting at the core of existence and of the material world, which is more and more synthetic and ephemeral. We believe in a new kind of progression, which moves on along a divine geometry. Art is for us the temptation to find out how to imitate this divine geometry through units of bytes, pixels, i.e. the big-endian but mimicking the analog world.

LC – How do you feel when you see your work completed?
AR – Most of the time, happy and tired. As the word work says it is not an easy process. It is more some sort of transformation. You may start with an idea but it is a long way to finalize these thoughts into an artwork.

LC – Where do you find your inspiration?
AR – At times in the social and sociological theory, that we try to evaluate and test not corroborating them as typically in scientific endeavors, but sensing them with more qualitative methods. Often in moments that lift some serious doubts about conducts considered normal and even untouchable. Now and then in dreams or quick visions or at least in jiffies full stillness that lasts an eternity.

LC – What do you think about the concept of this festival? How did it inspire you?
AR – We think it is a great opportunity to showcase your artworks besides other artists from all over the world, to connect with each other and to network. Moreover, you have the possibility to get discovered by national and international curators and art collectors. Events like this inspire us to push us to the next level, to explore new potential, to develop and to elaborate continuously your own style. Creating video art is kind of an inner journey to something hidden out there, that is waiting to be captured and later on to be exposed to the public.

LC – Can you explain something about the artworks you have in our exhibition?
AR – We are presented with three of our works that use diverse techniques of cinematography and video editing. Even if they point on different topics they have one in common, the passion for video art, the process of creation and recreation. Our goal is to find something magical in the unknown behind the curtain of our inner eyes.
TEMPORALLY tells the story of an Italian thunderstorm through the eyes of a Japanese painter. The lightning itself fusions with its environment and creates a hypnotic point of view. The sound in the video was recorded on the occasion of the exceptionally high water alert in Venice, Italy. The alarm is composed of two parts. The first was the sirene in use under bombardments during WW2, whereas the second is designed by the University of Venice and should be heard during all the sleep phases, yet not causing any panic. The images themselves were shot during multiple thunderstorms in the mountains between Lake Lugano and Lake Como. So, an interplay of salt and sweet water. Furthermore, the title TEMPORALLY is a combination of the Italian word for storm “temporale”, and the word for atmospheric weather “tempo” which in English means rhythm and rally, thus a race of lightning, in the end, following in a recovery.
Timor Panicus
What if the gateway to Agartha would have been relocated to the very center of a billion busy alpha city metropole, Milan, where fashion and financial districts meet? Horripilation? Not at all. Perhaps when the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro envisioned his Solar Disc, an extraterrestrial intelligence was capable to align diverse terrestrial forces in order to bring them locating the magnum opus there where it actually is, concealing the very toran to that secret ruling world, in disguise among passers-by quintessentially too blind for even just inquiring about the identity of the ruler of the Earth. Until a day, a female street performer declaims in the premises of the Big Disc the prologue by the French inquisitive mind of René Guénon to the narration about the King of the World. And the mechanism starts moving opening up the underground secrecy for everyman.
AT MOre SPHERES
In the nearby future, the Gulf stream may certainly collapse in itself as the percentage of saltwater and sweet water in the oceans is changing dramatically. More and more glaciers are melting worldwide introducing an enormous amount of sweet water into the seas which causes a disbalance of the ocean water streams. There will be not only a rise of the sea levels which may flood coast by cities but also the “power engine” of the Gulf stream which is the “heating system” for Northern Europe is losing its force and energy. Therefore parts of the earth might become very cold and at the same point other parts too hot to live on. So the equilibrium of the earth’s temperature is going to be mad. Is there any escape? Maybe leaving mother earth to explore the deep space of our universe? There will be neither sounds nor noises, only freezing silence as there is no echo, no resonance in space. AT MOre SPHERES tries to create an image of futuristic cold space and is meant to be screened in a loop on the surface of a building at night, video display, projection mapping or even cinema screen.

LC – What do you think about ITSLIQUID Platform?
AR – It is a great platform to discover new artists and to be discovered by contemporary art lovers worldwide.

LC – What do you think about the organization of our event?
AR – We believe that the organizers did a great job organizing an event in the middle of a pandemic that crushed the world into pieces. Art should be always a tool to connect people and to overwhelm social crises.

LC – Would you suggest a collaboration with us? What do you think about our services?
AR – Yes, absolutely. We think it is a good way to exhibit your works in the most beautiful cities of the world, having a great team of support to make the most out of your show.