Fondazione
Mathias Poledna
Fondazione, 1998
Video installation 3 parts, video projection, color, sound, 28 min (loop), wooden bench covered with cork (70 x 300 x 70 cm), cork panel with black screen print (200 x 100 cm)
GF0002017.00.0-1999
Artwork text
This installation, created by Mathias Poledna within the framework of the exhibition The making of, superimposes Generali Foundation motifs on those of the “Fondazione Feltrinelli” in Milan, one of the major archives and study centers for the history of socialism and the worker’s movement. Unlike its founder, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the prominent publisher and active supporter of the militant Italian left, who died in the course of a failed terrorist attack in the early 1970s, today the Fondazione claims academic autonomy from politics. By means of constructed analogies and on-site research, this semi-documentary video traces the contradictions and ambivalence inherent in such processes of historicization. (Mathias Poledna) “Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s original idea was to advance the growth of understanding and historical interpretation of the major institutional, social, and economic transformations of collective and emancipatory movements, which have marked the painful progress, the conflicts, ideals, and interests of modernity. To understand the present, to be able to orient towards the future, to confront it, it was absolutely necessary to be in possession of a capital of memory.” (Salvatore Veca, Preface Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Una guida.)