Ten years have passed since the first presentation of one of the most important video works of the 21st century, still among the most iconic created in the last quarter-century by artists working with this medium. We are talking about Manifesto by Julian Rosefeldt (1965, Munich, lives in Berlin), which was presented at ACMI — Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and then went on to make waves worldwide. The video is conceived as a series of thirteen short films, each set in a different social or work context with impeccable aesthetics, especially in the rendering of environments, with certain shots comparable to virtuosic essays in urban photography. All, except for the prologue, are performed by the Australian actress and two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, who brings to life thirteen characters, almost all female in opposition to a cultural history traditionally dominated by male voices, who declaim texts composed of collages of excerpts from over fifty artistic manifestos from the first and second half of the twentieth century. The incipit of the prologue, instead, visualized as a nocturnal bonfire without characters, is a phrase taken from the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels from 1848 («All that is solid melts into air»), underlining from the beginning the common revolutionary matrix of the declarations of poetics that in the international panorama of those years shook the visual arts, dance, architecture, literature and cinema to their foundations.
Julian Rosefeldt, “Manifesto”, 2015-2025, installation view at XNL Piacenza Arte, ph. Daniele Signaroldi, courtesy the artist and XNL Piacenza Arte
The manifestos proclaimed in the film are: Situationism (by a homeless person), Futurism (by a financial broker), Architecture (by a worker in a waste incinerator), Vorticism/Blue Rider/Abstract Expressionism (by the CEO of a company), Stridentism/Creationism (by a punk girl in a music rehearsal room), Suprematism/Constructivism (by a scientist), Dadaism (by a speaker at a funeral), Surrealism/Spatialism (by a puppeteer), Pop Art (by a traditionalist family mother at the table), Fluxus/Merz/Happening (by a choreographer), Conceptual Art/Minimalism (by a television news anchor), Cinema (by a teacher). Each of these programmatic declarations is in turn the result of the interpolation of passages written by different authors and not always belonging to the same movement, further expanding the textual semantic field, already increased by the collision of contemporary suggestions evoked by the images with the atmospheres conjured by the words. To celebrate this anniversary, XNL Piacenza Arte has decided to dedicate its twenty-fifth institutional exhibition to Manifesto, re-presenting it as a thirteen-channel video installation specially redesigned for the ground floor exhibition spaces and created in collaboration with the publishing house Electa.
Julian Rosefeldt, “Manifesto”, 2015-2025, installation view at XNL Piacenza Arte, ph. Daniele Signaroldi, courtesy the artist and XNL Piacenza Arte
Rosefeldt’s work on the original texts constitutes the most radical and significant operation of the work: the artist does not limit himself to simple quotation or didactic montage, but operates a true cultural core sampling, restoring to historical manifestos their most authentic and often forgotten dimension: that of urgent, fragile and sometimes contradictory expressions of young artists in formation. Most of these texts were written by people in their twenties, by still insecure minds who shouted their certainties precisely because they were searching for an identity. Art historians have subsequently crystallized these documents by connecting them to the mature works of the artists and transforming them into theoretical monuments. Rosefeldt performs the inverse operation: he brings them back to their original spark, to their nature as nocturnal conversations around a table, enthusiastic exchanges of revolutionary ideas among friends. This approach has allowed the artist to be both respectful and bold toward historical authorship, mixing fragments of different authors without misunderstanding their meaning and intentions. If the avant-gardes were born from small groups of visionaries inflamed by a common utopia, his reworking amplifies these flows of thought into a stratified text that, while preserving the ideological core of the original manifestos, projects them into a choral sphere, where individual voices dissolve into a collective urgency. What emerges with disruptive force from the work is the disconcerting vitality of these texts: passages written a hundred years ago resonate with almost prophetic precision in the present, such as the manifesto of the John Reed Club of New York from 1932: «The old world is dying; another is being born. Capitalist civilization, which has dominated the economic, political and cultural life of the continents, is undergoing a process of decay. At this moment it is generating new and devastating wars. At this precise moment the Far East is seething with military conflicts and preparations that will have consequences for all humanity. Meanwhile, the prevailing economic crisis puts ever more burdens on the masses of the world’s population, and especially on those who work with their arms and with their minds».
Julian Rosefeldt, “Manifesto”, 2015-2025, installation view at XNL Piacenza Arte, ph. Daniele Signaroldi, courtesy the artist and XNL Piacenza Arte
The relevance of these words, written three years after the Great Depression in an America suspended between two world wars, with the feeling that something terrible was about to arrive, is not limited to individual passages. The entire structure of the work is based on an element common to all historical manifestos: a productive and creative anger that explicitly contrasts with the aggressiveness of (new and old) populisms. While political propaganda sells fear and seeks to divide society with simple and effective recipes, as we sadly observe today in various Western democracies, the anger of the manifestos defines the role of art not as passive reflection of the world, but as a force capable of making a difference in a social and political context. In an era of wars, loneliness, disorientation, consumeristic and media overwhelm, in which every society fights against forms of demagoguery that threaten the ethical principles of coexistence and solidarity, Manifesto offers an antidote. The work does not propose solutions, but reminds us that insecurity and fragility can be transformed into creative energy and that dissent can be fruitful if channeled through thought and imagination toward construction rather than demolition.
Julian Rosefeldt, “Manifesto”, 2015-2025, installation view at XNL Piacenza Arte, ph. Daniele Signaroldi, courtesy the artist and XNL Piacenza Arte
The thirteen-channel simultaneous installation exhibited in Piacenza amplifies the suggestiveness of the work compared to its linear cinematic version: the screens dialogue with each other in space, creating a stratification that is not only temporal but also spatial. The viewer can freely choose their own path, pause in front of one character, be attracted by another, capture fragments of different overlapping discourses. But it is especially in the moments of synchronization, when the audio tracks converge and the voices merge into a revolutionary polyphony, that maximum involvement is achieved. In these instants, the different manifestos are literally “sung” in unison, words mix, reinforce each other, create a chorus that cancels historical and geographical specificities to bring out the common urgency. This simultaneity is not only a formal device, but a political and aesthetic declaration in which the artist seems to suggest that the fragmentation of the present, with its multiple points of view, its fluid identities, its contradictions, can be overcome not with the imposition of a single narrative, but through a polyphony that embraces differences while maintaining a common horizon of transformation. It is the visual and sonic embodiment of what, ultimately, the historical manifestos sought to achieve: a collective revolution that does not cancel singularities but orchestrates them into a disruptive symphony.
Julian Rosefeldt, “Manifesto”, 2015-2025, installation view at XNL Piacenza Arte, ph. Daniele Signaroldi, courtesy the artist and XNL Piacenza Arte
Not by chance, the final episode sees Blanchett in the role of a teacher surrounded by children, the future generations, the artists we do not yet know. Here one of the most significant texts of the work is enunciated, taken from Jim Jarmusch’s Golden rules for making movies: «Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. […] Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. And remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to». This declaration perfectly synthesizes the operation carried out by Rosefeldt: a respectful but free appropriation, a creative reworking of the past to nourish the present. If everything we think is original is actually an echo of what we have consumed, seen, read and heard, we ourselves are history and forgetting this would mean condemning ourselves to repeat it, as warned by Hegel’s quotation taken up by Marx that hovers over the work: «History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce». Ten years after its creation, as this new edition at XNL Piacenza Arte demonstrates, Manifesto proves to possess a prophetic capacity that does not age, but strengthens with time, a very rare quality in contemporary artworks.
Info:
Manifesto by Julian Rosefeldt
18/09/2025 – 25/11/2025
XNL Piacenza
Via Santa Franca, 36 – Piacenza
www.fondazionepiacenzavigevano.it/xnl-piacenza
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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