SERPENTINA. Per un museum senza tempo
Details
Artist: Raffaela Naldi Rossano
Title: SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo
Year: 2023
Duration: 09:44 mins
Medium: Video
Credit: Courtesy of the Artist. Produced with the support of Fondazione Elpis as part of Una Boccata d'Arte 2023, a contemporary art project spread throughout Italy. Selected for AFI'25 by GAMeC, Bergamo.
SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo, (2023)
Raffaela Naldi Rossano
Selected by the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC) di Bergamo
SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo was developed in Belvì, Sardinia. The artist proposes a collaborative initiation/action with the local polifonic female choir from the rural village. It stems from an encounter with the archetype of the gongilo in ‘Letters from Prison’ by Gramsci, a native of Sardinia, and in the Museum of Natural Sciences in Belvì. The Gongilo is a small reptile, a snake with short limbs, featured in narratives midway between science and belief. Naldi Rossano explores the universal archetype of the snake in connection with the cult of the Mother Goddess. The film brings together some scenes taken inside the abandoned Natural Science Museum and others of the action held in the village by Naldi Rossano together with the group of women. The artist designed a wearable loom-woven textile as a transitional objet to perform together, made in collaboration with the traditional female artisans cooperative Le Murmuri. The action through moving image symbolically became the initiator to propose an alternative museum of natural history for the village of Belvi and to reactivate ancestral knowledge as generative for a new beginning for the community, strongly marked by increasing depopulation, starting from the regenerative feminine element. The community of Belvì, with its oral and scientific knowledge, is invited by the artist to be in relation with the traditional oral histories from the Mediterranean around sacredness of nature, with the intention of reactivating the museum as a container of diverse narratives.
Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, say:
The choice of Raffaela Naldi Rossano for the 2025 edition of AFI, dedicated to the theme of “Dream States,” stems from her ability to use artistic practice as a tool of rewriting, in which, like dreaming, fabulation becomes a political and transformative act. Her work operates within a liminal dimension, where personal and collective mythologies are reinterpreted to question dominant narrative codes and make way for marginalized figures and stories.
If the dream is understood as a site of elaboration of the past and a projection toward possible futures, Naldi Rossano’s research and language are steeped in it. Her research unfolds through archives, memories and belief systems to construct alternative narratives capable of challenging the physical, psychological and cultural boundaries that structure our perception of reality. Through the construction of new myths, her work opens up scenarios of possibility, in which the dream is not an escape but a space of negotiation, a territory of subversion and re-signification of the present.
Raffaela Naldi Rossano, SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo, 2023. Courtesy and © the artist. Produced with the support of Fondazione Elpis as part of Una Boccata d'Arte 2023, a contemporary art project spread throughout Italy. Selected for AFI'25 by GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy.
Raffaela Naldi Rossano, SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo, 2023. Courtesy and © the artist. Produced with the support of Fondazione Elpis as part of Una Boccata d'Arte 2023, a contemporary art project spread throughout Italy. Selected for AFI'25 by GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy.
Artist Q&A
What does a democratic, international film programme such as Artists' Film International, mean to you as an artist?
Artists' Film International represents to me a borderless platform of encounter and exchange for artists from all over the world. The network between numerous institutions permits to gather different visions around a same topic that is universally relevant, giving them the time to be in confrontation in a true dialogue. For me, it is a platform of production and circulation of horizontal and shared knowledge, both for the artists and for the audience. Dream States shifts this production of knowledge towards intuitive thinking, archetypes, imagination, dreaming and daydreaming.
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
I’ve a background in psychoanalysis, junghian and Gestalt therapy. As a child filming has always been my passion. Cinema has been historically related to the understanding of the psyche. I did my MA in moving image at Goldsmith as I intended image-making as a background methodology to construct my spacial installation. I work with images and text as base for its, I’ve always intended my installation as film stills, settings for activations, through audio or actions. During the pandemic I felt the urge to start making with the medium again as materialisation of space, time, experiences. I am interested in challenging time and the hegemony of narratives with a beg and an end. My methodology is to work with intuitive thinking, personifications of mythological characters and archetypes, mixed with personal experiences to challenge perception of time as more of an archive of intuitions than the one of a linear story, in relation also to contemporary technology and the way we construct memories through digital experiences nowadays.
Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
I have always been interested in the common Greek origin of two words: mania and mantis. A state of alteration is connected to the ability of divination, or even: the latter stems from the first. In a moment of history in which it is more than palpable the failure of the system we have relied upon for our individual and societal development, I think it is necessary to focus on alternative forms of production and circulation of knowledge and to try to explore their potential. In my films I try to question linear narratives and to de-compose and re-compose memories, actions, visions, images as a complex ecosystem that can trigger new ways of understanding of life and death, time and space, spirituality and the relationship between real and surreal.
Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
I would like to mention three main references for my film: Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian born intellectual and politician, not only for the huge impact that his thinking has on contemporaneity, but also because it is in his ‘Letters from prison’ that I have encountered for the first time the Gongilo, a small reptile that is central to Serpentina, symbol of renewal and rebirth connected with the cult of the Mother Goddess, widely developed in Sardinia since the Neolithic era. Starting with such an investigation of a primordial female cult, I discovered the Janas, Sardinian female mythological figures who lived in domus de janas, stone tombs whose walls were often adorned with magical and auspicious symbols. Their name echoes that of the janare, witches of the rural tradition of the Naples area, my hometown. Benevolent creatures, they spent their days weaving with golden threads. Their activity of weaving immediately evoked Maria Lai, a Sardinian artist known for her textile works and for the seminal ‘Legarsi alla Montagna’ developed in the small Sardinian town of Ulassai and among the most celebrated relational art events. I thus approached the Su Marmuri textile cooperative, which has long collaborated with Maria Lai, to produce the textile that appears in the performance recorder in the film. The last reference is Chris Marker’s La Jetée, quoted in the first frame of my film. The use of a temporal paradox in La Jetée, to assess that ‘there’s no escape out of time’ nurtured my idea of an a-temporal museum of natural science as a container for diachronic encounters can take place and where reality escapes a taxonomic cataloguing and exists in imagination, intuition and mytholology.
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
I am currently working on an expansion of my installation Tentacular Bed, commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for the 16th edition of the Biennial. Tentacular Bed is a sculptural platform in the form of an oversized, modular and transportable bed that can host different formations, of humans, animals, objects and activities. Some of its parts are equipped with musical strings and the audience is welcomed to activate them by ‘playing’ them. The installation is in reference to an imaginary geography related to the primordial Tethys Ocean, that imaginatively reconnect my hometown Naples to Delos, a sacred island in the Cyclades archipelago, outlining the shape of the bed, that resembles that of a bicaudate siren. I am working on writing a score for the sculptures/music instruments, in order to collectively activate them in different sessions of work. Through the songs and personification of mythological characters there will be the composition of a narrative for a new film, part of my research project WARP.
The ethos of Tentacular Bed, pertaining to an alternative geography of the Mediterranean envisioned as a liminal and non-border space in which transformations can occur and a-temporal and nonlinear narratives circulate, would find a new body in the soundscape and the film to be produced in the next year.
Production credits
Camera: Gianluca Flore, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Stefanos Papageorgiou; Editing: Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Valentin Milou; Audio: Raffaela Naldi Rossano; Chanting: Coro Stelle Splendens di Belvi, Sardegna; Song: La Canzone del Serpente: Marry me Drakon/Drakaina by Raffaela Naldi Rossano performed with the Choir Coro Stelle Splendens di Belvi, Sardegna; Text: Raffaela Naldi Rossano
Textiles: Raffaela Naldi Rossano with La Cooperativa Le Marmuri, Ullassai; Drone: Gianluca Flore; Sound mastering: Massimiliano Miele; Location scouting: Elvia Podde; B&W images by Georgia Stellin from Drakospita with Raffaela Naldi Rossano.
With special thanks to: Hydra, Andrea Bagnato, Michele D'Aurizio, Emanuela Manca, Olivia Fenu, Elvia Podde, Valentina Carboni, Sebastiana Muggironi, Paola Carta, Maria Antonietta Masala, Maria Cecilia Cardia, Bachisio Cadau, Francesca Pranteddu, Anna Pirisi, Simonetta Carboni e tutti gli amici di Belvi.
Details
Artist: Raffaela Naldi Rossano
Title: SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo
Year: 2023
Duration: 09:44 mins
Medium: Video
Credit: Courtesy of the Artist. Produced with the support of Fondazione Elpis as part of Una Boccata d'Arte 2023, a contemporary art project spread throughout Italy. Selected for AFI'25 by GAMeC, Bergamo.