Valentina Furian (Venice, Italy, 1989) lives and works in Milan. She graduated from the IUAV in Venice and the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Nantes.
Furian’s artistic research focuses mainly on moving images, exploring the relationship between man and nature. In particular, Furian is interested in animal domestication conceived as a form of human domination and how social rules domesticate humans.
She has exhibited her works at institutional and experimental venues, such as Museo delle Scienze – MUSE (Trento), MAXXI (Rome), Sunaparanta Center for Contemporary Art (Goa), Method Gallery, Soho House and IIC (Mumbai), MAMbo (Bologna), The Blank Contemporary Art (Bergamo), Musei Civici Bassano del Grappa, Il crepaccio, Case chiuse, Careof, ViaFarini in Milan, Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa in Venice, GalerieSAM83 (Czech Republic), and Goyki3 Art Incubator (Poland).
In 2021, Furian’s latest film production, Ciacco, was selected for the Cantica21 project, promoted by MAECI and MiBACT (now known as MiC) and Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea.
WORK ON DISPLAY
Ciacco, 2021 (*)
film 2K, 1:2.35, dolby 5.1 sound, 8′
Ciacco (2021) is a film project inspired by the VI Canto of Dante’s Inferno. Immersed in half darkness, the viewer is exposed to sounds which both fascinate and repulse, and is bombarded by a sequence of multiform and elusive images. The filmed sequences – wavering between reality and representation, narrative of the present and atemporal evocation – alternate.
What emerges is a disquieting presence, charged with an unusual feral quality. It is, perhaps, Cerberus, a «wild beast uncouth and cruel», a monster with «three throats» who, like a dog, torments «the people that are there submerged», tearing apart the spirits with its claws, ransacking the flesh of the damned ones. A sound, like rain, drips in the background, torturing the sinners.
The work alludes to the experience of the depraved people relegated in etèrnum, forever, to Dante’s third circle: that of the gluttons, such as Ciacco, whose perspective the spectator is literally asked to take on.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian Text with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary by Courtney Langdon, vol. 1 (Inferno) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918). English version.
* The film was produced for the project Cantica21 – Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, promoted by MAECI-DGSP / MiC-DGCC with the support of prender-si cura Mattatoio Roma and MUSE – Museo delle scienze di Trento.
