Marco Poloni

24 inkjet prints (23 photographs, 1 text panel)
2 wallpaper prints
2 16mm film projections of ethnographic footage filmed in Bolivia
dimensions variable

The Pistol of Monika Ertl is a case study from a constellation of works titled Codename: Osvaldo on which Marco Poloni is presently working. These case studies fan out from the complex figure of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Millionaire and revolutionary, Feltrinelli founded the publishing firm that bears his name, and was active in the anti-imperialist movements of the 60s and 70s under the battle name of compañero Osvaldo. This constellation of works is not an attempt to build a biography of the charismatic and complex figure of Feltrinelli. It is an attempt to examine a number of radical social and political ideas of the 60s and 70s, and an effort to explore the insurrectionary galaxy of that historical moment.

The constellation of photographs, films and texts of The Pistol of Monika Ertl narrates the killing in 1971 of Roberto Quintanilla, the General Consul of Bolivia in Hamburg, by a German, Monika Ertl. As head of the Bolivian secret police, Quintanilla captured Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle in October 1967, and commanded his summary execution. For the guerrilla, Quintanilla had to be eliminated. Monika Ertl was the favorite daughter of cinematographer and photographer Hans Ertl, the director of photography for Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial 1938 documentary film Olympia about the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin. Ertl had settled with his family in Bolivia after the war ended. Monika joined the Bolivian Liberation Army, and received her military training in Chile and Cuba. The revolver she used to terminate Quintanilla during her mission to Hamburg was given to her by Feltrinelli. The work exposes an intricate international network of relationships between underground actants of the international insurrectionary moment between the 60s and the 70s.
The installative form of the work is conceived as a reflexion on the loose connectivity of the revolutionary galaxy of that period and on our fragmentary knowledge of it, as well as on the structure of memory in general.

The elements of this work are visual knots between which a loose net is stretched. Rather than being constituted as an indexical chain, this constellation of images and texts forms a porous narrative in which meaning is generated through montage strategies derived from cinema.

<<< For more detailed information download the PDF Marco Poloni. The Pistol of Monika Ertl (2014) located in the sidebar.

Scomparsa delle lucciole (Disappearance of the Fireflies), 2011, is an experimental narrative about the entanglement of power relationships between State and Mafia, set in a devastated region of Sicily. The film takes its title and its cue from a stark image proposed in 1975 by Pasolini, in an article that analysed power transformations in Italy and anticipated the spectacularisation of politics. The film attempts to expand Pasolini’s poetic image by incorporating the Mafia, the obscure historical companion to State’s power. It articulates a number of concepts and narrative threads: the Mafia as faceless power, its impact on the urban landscape – in particular through unfinished architecture – and Sicily’s relationship to time and the notion of expenditure.

In the two films that belong to the group of works The Analogue Island, the artist investigates power configurations in Sicily and their effects on its topography. Poloni reads this island – the geographical epicentre of the entire Mediterranean Sea – as a symptom and prototype of nation-wide malgovernance. This analysis also provides insights into the emergence of parasitic power networks at a larger scale.

Image: Gregory Bindschedler
Sound: Rudy Decelière
Editing: Gregory Bindschedler & Marco Poloni

The Majorana Experiment fans out from an account of Ettore Majorana, a genius of Italian physics who disappeared at sea in 1938 under mysterious circumstances. A secret history of sorts, Majorana’s journey is a shadow line that traces the covert story of the creation of nuclear weapons. Majorana’s story became a myth after the publication in 1975 of Leonardo Sciascia’s novel The Vanishing of Majorana. The polemic generated by this publication spurred an impressive number of speculative theories, some more plausible than others, about the causes that pushed Majorana to cover up his tracks. One theory gained much currency over the years: Majorana orchestrated his own disappearance because of his anticipation of the deadly outcome of the discovery of nuclear fission. The theory advanced in this constellation of works is speculative. Majorana operated a ‘quantum disappearance’ on himself: a passage from an embodied existence to a multiplication of eigenstates, which can synchronically co-exist in different places, transcending the laws that link time and space.

The Majorana Experiment comprises several films, a set of photographs, a LED lightbox, a stereograph and several historical douments that constitute an open narrative dispositif.

In Majorana Eigenstates an actor who interprets Majorana – and who strangely resembles him – synchronically lives in two places: a hotel room in Napoli, where the real Ettore Majorana lived before vanishing at sea, and the cabin of a ship. The use of two cameras with a parallax gap generates a split filmic space.

Domus Galilaeana, Majorana Fund, File 13-0122 displays a document that contains a series of tables and numbers handwritten by Majorana in minute characters. The data describe the size and armament of military ships before World War II. At the time of his disappearance, Majorana was convinced of the imminence of a world conflict and believed that the war would be won or lost at sea.

The Desert Hotel, 2006
The Desert Room, 2006
Mr. Locke, …, 2002

The constellation of photographs The Desert Hotel intersperses stills from Antonioni’s film The Passenger with images of the site and the village of Illizi in the Algerian Sahara, where the desert hotel sequences in the film were shot. Today, the Hotel Restaurant Bar Abba Kada used as a set is barely recognizable. It is said to have become a retirement home for ex-Mudjaheddin fighters of the National Liberation Front. The remains of a Land Rover, in all aspects similar to the vehicle of David Locke, rots in front of the nondescript building. The work attempts to show the romantic, economic and geostrategic underpinnings of the area, which was a haven in the desert for hippies during the seventies, and today is a basin for oil extraction and the site of an american military base for aerial surveillance of guerrilla and terrorist movements operating at the Libyan border of Algeria.

The dispositif of The Desert Room is based on a meticulous reproduction of the hotel room in the North-African desert where, in Antonioni’s film The Passenger, the TV reporter David Locke trades his identity for that of an arms dealer working for the Chadian guerrilla. A carved wooden door opens to a barely furnished, neon-lit room: a blue metal bed, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, a round table with a chair, a TV set tuned to Al-Jazeera broadcasting news in Arabic, and a ceiling fan spinning against the hot air. The large window is open to the desert night. The sound of crickets is discernable in the surrounding darkness. The dull and worn-out furnishings, the sounds, the hot temperature, the odour of ‘whateverness’ that pervades the room, contribute to a sense of transport and alienation. The laptop on the table is open, showing the interface of a video editing program, as if someone has been working on a project. On the screen, the spectator sees a forward travelling shot filmed inside the same room, randomly interwoven with documentary footage showing U.S. soldiers in warfare situations which clearly take place in contemporary Iraq. The spectator can control the camera’s movements with the computer’s keyboard and frame objects in the room. Through the TV program and the flickering of the neon, which appear in sync on the screen, he realises that he is seeing live footage of the very room he is in. Yet the camera does not register his or her presence. The seat he or she is occupying is empty. The undetectable camera that the spectator could manipulate in the life-sized room actually moves on a motorized dolly inside a 1:3 scale model of the room, which is visible when exiting the room.

In the short video Mr. Locke, ..., the soundtrack of a scene in Antonioni’s film The Passenger is superimposed onto low-definition images downloaded from the web. The original scene from Antonioni’s film features a key exchange between the reporter David Locke, played by Jack Nicholson, and an African witch doctor, who responds to Locke’s interview questions by stating matter-of-factly “Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers will be about me,” and then literally turning the camera back on the reporter. In the video, these words are heard over the close-up of a bearded, Arab-looking man. In the aftermath of 9/11, the spectator is left wondering whether this man is an Al-Qaeda terrorist. The play of reversed specularity, prompted by the soundtrack, is constructed in order to confront the spectator’s beliefs.