Foreign at home. The circulation of Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian’s films beyond Italy

Overlooked for a long time at home, the work by Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian is an important and unique contribution to the contemporary Italian experimental moving image that has been acknowledged and celebrated mostly abroad. Spanning over some forty years and comprising a variety of media, their artistic research has combined video, performance, found footage film, drawing and video installations to challenge and critique contemporary visual culture, exercising a powerful gaze on reality, at once provocative and delicate. Their work notably delves into issues of cultural and political history, war and the human body, survival, collecting and archival preservation but it is also focussed on specific figures from the past that are meaningful for the filmmakers. Be it adopted to sketch a moment in time, a person, a collection of objects, a sensation or an event, the artists’ attitude is one of study, observation, re-signification. Artisans by education, caretakers by vocation, the result is an outcome of rare poetic value. By offering a focus on the artists, this article aims at offering an analysis of the circulation of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s work beyond the Italian context, questioning the logics of production and distribution of artists moving image.