California Italian Studies

On November 3, 2022 a video projection entitled Inhabiting Zenobia, created and edited by Costanza Ferrini, took place as part of Light Year, a series of monthly projections of video art and experimental film on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. Begun in June 2015, this series offers, on the first Thursday of every month, free projections with thousands of viewers in attendance in loco and many more worldwide following these events via live streaming online. The aim of Light Year is to build bridges by bringing together artists and spectators from all over the world, creating synergies between various forms of public art, video art and experimental cinema. Inhabiting Zenobia (Light Year #91) consisted of multiple large-scale video projections on one of the anchor walls of the Manhattan Bridge and, simultaneously, in the Drey Gallery (East York, Toronto) and the Scope BLN Gallery (Berlin).  Through the video works or fragments presented, Inhabiting Zenobia sought to suggest some strands running through Calvino's thought in regard to the form of the invisible—and sometimes unlivable—city, although it did so without necessarily making these explicit.  The artists Jamila Campagna&Alektron, Raffaella Valsecchi, Francesca Manca di Villahermosa, Miltos Manetas, Alessio Liberati, and Dimitri Porcu & Lionel Martin took part in Costanza Ferrini's project. Zenobia is in fact the name that Calvino chose in Invisible Cities for the most vertical of the "thin cities" ("Thin Cities," 2). It is perhaps, according to Ferrini, the fictional invisible city closest to the world-city envisioned by Calvino, which is likewise vertical and thin. The video projection explored different points of view, forms and modes of living the city, particularly those vertical worlds hidden in invisible corners of megacities and cities across the planet. The work's essential hypothesis is that Zenobia—the invisible vertical city—is the projection of the society in which many of us now live.  In these “Notes from the Field,” Ferrini reflects back on her work and on how in the 1970s Calvino anticipated the contemporary megalopolis to come. In the Light Years projection curated by Ferrini, the notion of verticality was suggested through a form of conceptual, visual and aural expression that sought to convey all of its contradictions, omissions, and frailties. In the first part of her text written for California Italian Studies, Ferrini offers notes and reflections on the various modalities through which Calvino's work—especially Invisible Cities, "Dall'opaco" and Six Memos for the Next Millennium—served to inspire her own artistic activity. She also sets her work in relation to that of other writers and artists such as the Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni and the video artist Adrian Paci. In the second part, she discusses not only the respective methods employed by the participating artists, but the meaning underlying their video contributions to the project as well as the links between their own works and Calvino's themes. At the end of the essay Ferrini includes a link providing access (via the Facebook platform) to the complete video version of Inhabiting Zenobia.