Join us to celebrate a new bilingual monograph which for the first time comprehensively chronicles and sets into today’s context the work of Roberto Taroni and Luisa Cividin across film and performance. Alongside a special screening of some of Taroni-Cividin’s film and video works restored in the context of the project, artist Roberto Taroni and editor Flora Pitrolo will be joined in conversation by Simona Monizza and Julian Ross to discuss the duo’s radical interdisciplinary practice. 

After the launch there will be drinks at Eye Bar, Eye Filmmuseum, IJpromenade 1, and the possibility to obtain the book with discount. See below for further information on the book. 

The project is supported by the Italian Council (2021), Directorate – General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.

Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema 1977-1984

The practice of Milan-based duo Taroni-Cividin constitutes one of the most groundbreaking yet rarely traversed areas of the Italian experimental performance archive. Active between 1977 and 1984 – during which they produced over 30 performances and films both in Italy and internationally – Roberto Taroni and Luisa Cividin pushed the edges of the live and the recorded, and of cinematic, bodily and spatial practices. In interaction with visual and installation work and through a highly personal use of video and audio technologies, they developed an approach to performance-making that continues to generate questions in some of the contemporary moment’s most pressing debates.

Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984) seeks to do justice to the complexity and richness of Taroni-Cividin’s work, giving the reader a sense of the theoretical perspectives that guided it, bringing to light precious archival materials, and critically re-examining a season of Italian contemporary art which has thus far been largely neglected.

The project is supported by the Italian Council (2021), Directorate – General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.

Simona Monizza is Curator of Experimental Film at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam since 2012, where she is responsible for the archiving, preservation, research and presentation of the experimental film collection. At the heart of her job lies the passion for taking care of this fragile and often neglected collection and nurturing the relationship with the filmmakers and their estates. After graduating from the Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House in 1998, she has worked at the BFI and then joined EYE in 2000 as Film Restorer and then Collection Specialist. Her field of interest also extends to Home Movies, analogue cinema and films made by women.

Flora Pitrolo is a scholar, translator, and curator. Currently a Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, her work investigates the problems of the postmodern through experimental music and performance archives, mostly in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, from the 1980s to the present. Her most recent book is Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias (Palgrave 2022, co-edited with Marko Zubak). She is the author of numerous academic articles, and works as a curator and arts programmer in Italy and the Balkans.

Roberto Taroni began making performance and video art in the mid to late 1970s. In 1977 he started working with Luisa Cividin as Taroni-Cividin, and in the same year founded the space Sixto Notes in Milan. Currently active as Flatform, his works have been presented in international events including the Venice Biennale, the International Week of Performance in Bologna, the Symposium Internationale D’Art Performance in Lyon, the Forum ’80 in Middelburg, the Italian Art 1960-1982 in London and in private galleries and international museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the PAC in Milan. 

Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. He is film program advisor at IDFA and was a film programmer at film festivals such as Doc Fortnight 2023 at The Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Locarno Film Festival. He is Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) where he is also co-director of the interdisciplinary research centre ReCNTR.