Now in its tenth edition, Ibrida Festival delle Arti Intermediali has confirmed its vocation as a laboratory for intermedial research, distinguishing itself as a platform where reflection on audiovisual language becomes a tool for interrogating the present, from geopolitical tensions to the perceptual transformations generated by the digital realm. In this edition, two of the awards – Ibrida Prize Italia and Premio Atrium – were both assigned to Gianluca Abbate for the video Fallen Houses. The first jury awarded the work “for its ability to interweave the languages of video art, performance and dance, delivering a vision that is both poetic and critical of contemporaneity”, also recognizing “the evocative power and formal quality of an original and incisive language”. In motivating Premio Atrium, the jurors emphasized how the work “imagines architectures as living organisms, in which urban geometries intertwine with the bodies of dancers”, evoking “memories and transformations that inhabit the built space”.
Ibrida Festival, premiazione di Gianluca Abbate, ph. George Matei, courtesy Ibrida Festival
With Fallen Houses, Gianluca Abbate continues his investigation into the poetic and conceptual possibilities of digital editing, creating a symbiosis between architecture and body. The buildings here are not scenography but living presences: from them oversized human figures emerge, as if the city were returning to light the stories that inhabit it. The technical virtuosity of cutouts and layering constructs a visual vertigo, where the real and the artificial merge. The architectures become metaphors for a compressed humanity ready to re-emerge, amid allusions to earthquakes, wars and migrations. The urban landscape comes alive with bodies trying to escape the rigidity of structures, as if stone and concrete, tired of containing, decided to expel life. It is a video that translates the precariousness of our time into a visual language of great precision and lyricism, capable of colliding the aesthetics of digital perfection with human fragility.
Gianluca Abbate, “Fallen Houses”, 2024, documentary, 15 min., video still, courtesy of the artist and Ibrida Festival
Emanuela Zanon: In Fallen Houses, bodies seem to emerge from architectures as personifications of repressed memories: where does this vision come from?
Gianluca Abbate: After a long time, I realized that buildings appear in all my works. At a certain point, I asked myself why. Even in Panorama, for example, which is a short film set in an imaginary city, the idea was suggested to me by the cities themselves: by their infrastructures, streets, tram rails. All these elements create a sort of “direction of the gaze”, as if the city itself had a precise way of showing itself, of being framed. If we think about it, observing the urban landscape from a tram window, the visual path will always be the same, the city offers us its own staging. In Fallen Houses, the same suggestion continues, focusing more closely on the architectures that in Panorama were part of the landscape. For a long time, I had the intuition that our eyes were like windows through which we observe the world. During lockdown, this sensation intensified: I could only see the outside through my home windows, and I began to imagine that buildings could have eyes, ears, lungs, a body. Notice this: when something unpleasant happens in an apartment building, the entire building somehow feels it. Even if the event concerns only one apartment, it seems that the entire building bears the weight, as if there existed a kind of collective condominium unconscious that binds everyone into a single body-architecture. Then came my father’s illness. One day, going to visit him in the hospital, I saw his destroyed body, as if it were a collapsed building. I told him: “Dad, you look like someone who jumped with a parachute and the parachute didn’t open”. In that moment, I perceived the fragility of the human body, which for me coincided with my father, family, home, everything that was giving way. This short circuit brought me back to a childhood memory: my father’s account of the Irpinia earthquake. I was only a few months old, I have no direct memory, but he told me about that night when he saw buildings bend, move, collapse. Over time, however, he lost the memory of that event, yet now that memory lives in me, through his account. It’s as if it dwells in a room of my mind, from which it observes the world through my eyes, as if they were windows.
Gianluca Abbate, “Fallen Houses”, 2024, documentary, 15 min., video still, courtesy of the artist and Ibrida Festival
The jury spoke of a “dialogue between matter and movement”: do you consider editing a choreographic act, a way to make architectures dance by assimilating them to bodies?
Yes, editing is a fundamental element. For some time, I’ve decided to extend this concept not only to the relationship between different shots, but also within the single shot. Every image has its own reading time: the eye starts from the center and then moves toward the periphery, exploring the visual space. It’s there, inside the image itself, that I’m interested in intervening, restructuring it, moving, deforming, layering, in a certain sense “traumatizing” it. For me, this is an extremely powerful tool, capable of generating meaning within the frame. It’s the heart of my research: editing within the image. Then, naturally, the editing between different shots constructs the overall discourse of the film, but what truly fascinates me is amplifying the meaning of each single frame: through these layering practices, making it live, breathe, and, in a certain way, dance.
Gianluca Abbate, “Fallen Houses”, 2024, documentary, 15 min., video still, courtesy of the artist and Ibrida Festival
The virtuosity in digital cutouts and the control of various image layers at the basis of these filmic collages produces an ambiguous image, almost endowed with artisanal physical depth: how much are you interested in having the viewer perceive the glitch and the artifice in this subtle material illusion?
What interests me, from a technical point of view, in the overlays I create is that there’s always a moment when the technique becomes visible. If it were perfect, it would be a mistake. I prefer that the artifice be perceived, even if only subtly. This has a precise meaning for me. I think that right in that small technical imperfection, a space opens up, a gap: the viewers no longer wonders whether what they see is “true” or “false”, or how it was made. They accept it. In that imperfect fragment, the viewer recognizes the visual device and, within that void, can reflect themselves. Let me give an example: Andy Warhol said “I want to be a machine”. I’m not so interested in the question of technical reproducibility, but I find the serigraphic imperfection of his works fascinating. In his works, I think of the Marilyn Monroe prints, those smudges along the color edges, those imprecisions, generate a tension, a small visual trauma that always strikes me. In those imperfections, I feel all the fragility, even the tragedy, of the image. That’s why I’ve never wanted to be technically flawless. On the contrary, it’s in the small errors that I recognize myself. It’s also one of the reasons why AI-generated images don’t entirely convince me: they’re cold, smooth, lacking those visual fissures that for me are indispensable, because it’s precisely there, in the cracks, that we can reflect ourselves.
Gianluca Abbate, “Fallen Houses”, 2024, documentary, 15 min., video still, courtesy of the artist and Ibrida Festival
Your images evoke catastrophes and rebirths: how much is autobiographical in these forms of “collapse” and how much is universal?
The scene of my father in the hospital struck me deeply, so the matrix of the work is undoubtedly personal. However, I believe that sooner or later we all must confront our relationship with our loved ones, with the fragility of bonds. In this sense, what initially originates from an intimate experience opens up to a more universal dimension. For this reason, at a certain point, I decided to place alongside my story those of two people I met during the development of the project: though coming from contexts very different from mine, one marked by war, one by political issues, they shared a similar trajectory, made of detachment, abandonment, and the search for a new form of belonging.
Gianluca Abbate, “Fallen Houses”, 2024, documentary, 15 min., video still, courtesy of the artist and Ibrida Festival
In the video, urban space is treated as a living organism, but also as a digital surface: how much does software language influence your compositional and narrative choices?
It’s fundamental to have deep control of software when working with images. Digital has given us extremely powerful tools, which make the image completely manipulable: a grid of pixels that we can move, deform, transform as we wish. But precisely for this reason, strong and conscious control is needed. Before each project, I do many tests, experimenting with different techniques to understand where they can take me. Only when I manage to obtain the image I was looking for do I understand how to develop the work. Fallen Houses, for example, was born from a long research phase: I have test footage from several years ago in which I visualized dancers immersed in an urban landscape. When I finally saw that image take shape, I understood that I could realize the project. This experimental phase is the most stimulating for me; then comes the construction of the entire architecture of the work, which in the case of Fallen Houses required three years, a time I could only undertake because, thanks to the initial tests, I knew I had the visual tools to complete it as I imagined it.
Gianluca Abbate, “Fallen Houses”, 2024, documentary, 15 min., video still, courtesy of the artist and Ibrida Festival
After the two prizes received at Ibrida, what do you think could be the future evolution of your research?
I’ve been working for about two years on a new film, this time a feature film titled Your Body Is a Battleground. I’ve already developed the screenplay, the subject and the entire narrative structure. In this project too, the body and space will have a central role: there will be a lot of dance, which for me is an extremely powerful form of expression and transformation. The film will connect different worlds, that of dance and that of people who apparently have nothing to do with it, to intercept how the dynamics that manifest in dance are, ultimately, the same ones that move us in daily life. As in my previous works, here too architectural space will be fundamental, but perhaps this time we’ll find ourselves inside the buildings, and no longer outside. I hope to be able to complete it in the next three years
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Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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