This is the personal website of Alberto Brogi, with information on the new projects and past ones.
I am a graduate in History of Arts, with a thesis on History of Theatre. In university, I studied mainly History and Critic of Theatre, Cinema, Literature especially italian, Philosophy and Art. In the meanwhile, outside the university, I attended some direction and editing courses, and theater courses. This gave me the possibility to put into practice what I studied as theories, history and critical analysis; it was my goal since the beginning, in the sense that I thought that I needed a theoretical and historical base, and knowledge, to be able to start my intervention on arts. Also since the beginning, the intervention was going in multiple directions: theatre, as actor and often also a director; video, mostly experimental, documentaries, comic, or video blog ones; indefinite video objects, at a crossroad with art and video art; literature, with short stories and theatrical scripts; art critic, with studies analysis and reviews of cinema, theatre, art and in general culture’s world. In fact for me all these activities are all part of the same intervention on the real.
At the base of all, there is the intention to describe the real, to save it, with all the way that is possible, and to interact with the real. Medium will change, as so the forms some of which are specific to the medium itself.
The choice to use the names from my mother’s families for this blog, and for some artworks, is due to the nearness to this part of my family. Description of the real and intent to save it, it’s also part of my mother’s books: she wrote two books, one describing in some short stories, the events and the life of her family, farmers in Tuscan countryside, decades ago; and the second, a book with short stories and a collection of recipes, which were the Ulivieri’s and Scardigli’s traditional recipes; all of this, with the goal to make me and my sister know about the history of our family, and to keep a record of our precious tradition, cuisine, and past time.
Another characteristic of my work is the attention to and the importance of the form; a long part of my studies was on avant-garde, surrealist, dadaist, and especially futurist movements; I believe that without a new research, and a searching form, there is no possibility to do new art, in the sense that without paying attention to the form, and to the research, what follows is art looking in the direction of the simple content, and in this case art is usually very near to zero, or repetition of the “already made”, and stasis.
Information about some of the present activities
Materiale video senza titolo - Video material without title
A big part of my activities, since 1992, was recording, filming and saving the real around. All these images compose one long, very long uninterrupted video, collected under the name “Video material without title”, quoting the use of art paintings, and also because there is not a true cinema form but it stands in a no man’s land in the middle of cinema, art, documentation, video blog.
Some of this Material video without title is here, on internet archive. Many are without words, so there’s no need to know italian to see them. There is the possibility to sort the videos by “date archived”, on the top of the page, this will put the last videos up.
A frame from Gli ultimi giorni - IV - Tramonto degli Uffizi, which is part of the series Materiale video senza titolo.
Le ventiquattr’ore - The twenty-four hours
It’s my first book, a collection of 24 short stories. The idea is to retrieve some influences from the middle age art and literature, when books were written with attention to concepts like hours of the day, months or other matematical measures; in italian literature, we have some great exemples in Divine Comedy’s 100 cantos, or the ten days of the Decameron; in art, the Très Riches Heures du Duc du Berry, one of the peaks of International Gothic. I tried to retain the same meticolous description of the life back then, in these middle age masterpieces; people, places, events, cases and incidents are registered in this late XX and the beginning of the new century. A particular attention was put on the form; each of the 24 stories is written in a different style, different italian language, different length, and some part also in other languages, mostly french. My intention was to make a vast fresco of the age, like, again, in some Gothic art; it’s the portrait of a world in decline, how it came to shape after the slow end of the post-war golden age with its widespread well-being, and the crisis that led us to this, crisis which is not over yet and that is, too, a subject portrayed in the book.
I have no idea if and when this book will be translated in english; I’d really like to get an english translation, but the book is very long, written in different styles and in general not so easy to read even in italian, so a translator would require a great deal of time and I suppose, a lot of resources to translate, so an english version is not soon forthcoming. Anyway, this is a major project for me, and exactly as middle age books, it’s a sort of a “summa” of my activity in art; inside the work, there are a continuous sequence of influences, from the already quoted middle age art and literature, to Realism and Modernism (Tozzi and Joyce over all), to post war writers and sui generis authors like Piero Chiara and Georges Simenon, to italian cinema, french art (especially impressionism) or avant-garde and expressionist art of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. The book in italian language should be ready next September.
The cover of the book “Le ventiquattr’ore”
The relationship with the heritage
Family, birthplace, origins, traditions, and other concepts connected with all these, like art and literature florished in my origin place - Renaissance, Humanism - have always had a great importance in my activity, a central, capital one. It’s probably normal because my family had always been peasants, and all their life revolved around their work, with a strong relationship with the earth as obvious. Now this is finished and I was the first in my family to lose contact with the craft of my relatives, but the culture where I grew was the same, starting from the cuisine to the behavior rules, to the importance given to the kindred, the family and friendship ties. So the past heritage is part of what I do and often is “inside” what I do, and it’s the same for the place of origin. Art of my origin place is often inside my videos, it is part of them, it causes often videos inspiration and it is a compositional part of the image.
In all this there is a refusal of the time; the idea is that keeping the ties with the past, this will also keep the past alive, and transmitted to the future, in a way.
Some projects go specifically to the roots of the family:
Images and documents from the family’s history are part of a larger concept which is to save both material remains and memory of this time. The intention is to save all the objects from our family past - toys, school notebooks, furniture, dishes, clothes, and countless others objects which arrive directly from the sixties, seventies, and often before. The goal is to keep the history of the family as much as possible and to save, together with the material things, its memory too.
A special part in all this are the images. We have about 2000 photos and about the same number of slides, documenting the life of a Tuscan family, which resided in North Italy for work, with many trips back to what they considered their true home, Tuscany, where we finally went back, in 1981.
