“Snags in Palladio”, video performance by Michele Manzini at ScreenDance Miami

ScreenDance Miami is a festival for promoting the extraordinary art of dancing and of performance art, all recounted through the many and incredible possibilities of the video camera. The festival will take place in Miami from January 21 to 26 2016 in various venues in the city as well as at the Perez Art Museum Miami, and is organized with the collaboration of Cinedans, the famous international dance film festival. On the occasion of ScreenDance Miami, Michele Manzini will be presenting at PAMM his video-performance Snags in Palladio in which architecture, video art, music, writing, performance, and dance will together create a dialogue. The protagonist of the video is the choreographer and performer Barbara Canal who, since 2000, has been a member of the Venice Biennale dance company directed by Carolyn Carlson.
Snags in Palladio evolved as a live performance on the basis of a complex textual research aimed at investigating contradictions. Realized in 2014 in the Palladian Villa Pojana, it was later translated into a video-performance divided into five sections, each lasting 6.03 minutes, and was screened for the first time in the Teatro Agorà at the Milan Triennial on February 4 2015.
The work was later selected for screening at some of the world's most important exhibitions and festivals: Japan, the United States, Poland, Portugal, Mexico...
The title refers to the experience of error, a necessary and essential moment for arriving at greater knowledge and awareness.
The artist has constructed scenes in which have been inserted "figures" that are portions of the world, indeterminate images that suggest various possible endings. The result is a work in which various moments cohabit: an orderly and measured harmony that is superimposed on the intriguing world of obscurity.
The texts written by Michele Manzini are an integral part of the video performance and each of them helps build up a possible story-line. Final understanding is arrived at only after having watched all five scenes. The first scene, Symmetries, inquires into the contradictory concept of beauty; the second is titled Domestic Spaces, and suggests an awareness that is essential to the body; the third, Allegories, explores the concept of masks and pretense; the fourth, Thresholds, analyzes the difference between boundaries and thresholds; and the final scene, Measurements, is constructed on the contradictions between reason and what, in our knowledge of the world, is instead obscure and multiple.
The artist seems to suggest a new vision of things. Everything pushes us towards an evolution of our "state of mind" which is reached by questioning previously acquired truths.
The next stop of Snags in Palladio will be at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York as part of the international Dance on Camera festival (February 12 -16 2016), one of the most important festivals in the world for the relationship between dance, performative art, and video. It is organized by the Dance Films Association and by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.
Michele Manzini is an italian artist born in Verona, Italy, in 1967.

For years his work has been focused upon the theme of landscape, setting it against the concept of harmony to create of figures capable of conveying instability and conflict as unresolved elements. His work has been displayed at many exhibits in Italy and abroad including those hosted at The Italian Institute of Culture in Prague (2009), Rome’s MAXXI (2009), SUPEC in Shanghai (during the 2010 EXPO), and at the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013). He has published several books including Il paesaggio e il suo mito (Editions de la Villette, Paris 2002) and Mescolanze Edizioni Kn-Studio -2011). Manzini was also the recipient of the Terna Contemporary Art Award in 2009

www.michelemanzini.com

"Snags in Palladio", a video performance by Michele Manzini
On the occasion of ScreenDance Miami
Venue: PAAM_Perez Art Museum Miami_MIAMI (USA)