100 Piper
Rä di Martino
Rä di Martino, PIPER 100, video still. Courtesy the artist.
FILM from an ARCHIVE
As part of the talks program commissioned by Artissima 2017, the classroom invited the Italian artist Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975) to make an artist documentary dedicated to the history and imagery of the Piper Club of Turin, the famous nightclub designed by Pietro Derossi with Giorgio Ceretti and Riccardo Rosso active in Turin from 1966 to 1969.
The artist operated on a private archive – kindly open by architect Pietro Derossi – re-activating the atmosphere of the famous disco through a subjective visual transcription of materials and the collection of unique memorabilia – photographs, slides, audio tapes and posters – coming from direct witnesses of that experience.
On this special occasion, which coincides with the fifty years since the opening of the disco, the classroom wanted to reactivate the temperatures of that moment through the eyes of a contemporary artist who was commissioned to create a project of strong experimental nature, able to weave archive materials within a free and completely personal visual narrative.
The Piper of Turin still remains an international model of non-institutional space for contemporary art, not a mere disco but a real self-managed cultural center, inspired by the British and American radical research of the second half of the 1960s in which they met , among others: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Piero Gilardi, Gianni Piacentino, Clino Castelli, Gilberto Zorio, Anne Marie Sauzeau, Mario e Marisa Merz, Carlo Colnaghi, Carlo Quartucci, Patty Pravo, Massimo Pellegrini, Giancarlo Bignardi, Giorgio Bergami, Tonino Conte, Sergio Liberovici, Le Stelle di Mario Schifano, Living Theater, Human Family, Equipe 84, Carmelo Bene.
To realize her film Rä di Martino worked using archival materials, including photographs, slides and stories and drawing on valuable historical evidence. The project, born with the collaboration and support of Artissima, La Venaria Reale Foundation Conservation and Restoration Center and CSC National Cinema Enterprise Archive was developed thanks to the support of the Monica de Cardenas Gallery, Gino and Antonella Collection Viliani and thanks to the Fellow’s Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.
