Racconto antiorario (6 costellazioni) / Scripting anticlockwise (6 constellations), HD video, 10’04’’, 2017

Camera: Marco Costantini & Fabio Petronilli; Lighting design: Sebastiano Peyron; Sound design: Liliana Villaseñor, César González; Color correction: Marco Costantini

At the center of a dark space, the camera’s anticlockwise rotation around a column marks the rhythmic succession of a series of abstract images. As lines connecting dots spread around a sheet of paper, trajectories, colours, shapes and volumes seem to materialise fragments of an unknown alphabet. Meanwhile, in what seems to be a divinatory process, a voice over uses these very same fragments to propose starting points for futures stories.

Developed from a live performance, the film employs an abstract narrative to imagine six possible constellations that take shape in that space created between the narrator, the actors, the props and the dark of the night.

Portrait of I (blue), HD film, 15' 17'', UK/Mexico 2017

Cinematographer: Fabio Petronilli; Sound mixing: Liliana Villaseñor

Let's say that a first man – maybe the protagonist of this story, let's call him X - let’s say that X decides to work on a film that looks at the relationship between portraiture, self-portraiture and silence.

The way he envisages to do it, is by filming another man - a second man, let’s call him Y - which, by the way, happens to be the first man’s alter ego. The idea is that he - meaning Y - will appear in front of the camera, becoming the only visual focus of that portrait.

What X wants to know is if, by pointing the camera long enough onto Y, and despite asking him not to speak, to be completely silent, if the lens will actually pick up some essence of that man, of Y, and consequently, being Y the alter ego of X, if the camera will pick up something about X too […]

The Melody is in the eye (words are just the left hand); HD film, 23' 24'', Italy/Mexico 2016

Actors: Sabrina Modenini / Andrea De Manincor; Cinematographer: Fabio Petronilli; Second camera: Sonia Veronelli; Sound mixing: Filippo Restelli; Colour grading: estudio de producción (Mexico)

The film is a reenactment for camera of a live performance. It focuses on the idea of ‘arguments’ (more specifically: couple arguments) as a device for fast-forwarded storytelling, for syncopate and fragmented narratives. Two actors (a man and a woman in their late forties) are portrayed moving around a half-empty villa while enacting an escalating argument.

The film is structured around 5 scenes following the classic 5-acts dramatic structure. The script is loosely based on a multitude of sources: literary and filmic references, cliches, stereotypes and personal references.

The Protagonist, HD video, 17' 39'', Geneva/London 2015

Cinematographer: Giorgio Bosisio; Gaffer/focus puller: Julia Sangnakkara; Assistant: Claire Chassot; Actors: Mathieu Ziegler, Stefan Kollmuss; Sound mix and recording: Charles Menger; Sound design: Emmet O'Donnell; Colour grading: Alex Grigoras; Locations: Cinema Arditi, Geneva.

Loosely constructed from a collage of literary references, filmic vocabulary, broken-up narratives and improvisations, The Protagonist is a work where the construction of a main character for a film is treated as an event for camera, a happening that becomes the film itself.

Shot in two different interiors (an empty cinema and a house-party turning into a karaoke night) and constructed through six interconnected scenes, the film uses the tropes normally associated with the basic shaping of a narrative persona - looks, behaviours, personal details, surroundings etc. - and turns them all into the only available storyline to be followed.

In an empty cinema, two unnamed men discuss the treatment for a possible narrative. Their abstract discussions are continuously interrupted by a second, parallel sequence: the movements and behaviours of a series of men and women abstractly portrayed while drinking, dancing, singing and carelessly chatting during a karaoke party.

Los Barbaros, HD video, 18'48'', Mexico City/London 2015

Cinematographer: Matias Penachino; Sound design: Francesco Pedraglio; Location: Casa Pedregal, Mexico City

Los Barbaros (‘The Barbarians’) (2015) is the recording of a live event, a non-choreographed, spontaneous performance that takes place at the Villa Pedregal on the outskirts of Mexico City from a Saturday afternoon to the early hours of the following morning. With no script, no storyboard and no specific instructions to the participants, twenty acquaintances are invited to dine, drink and talk, to freely roam and rummage around the vast house and its garden, to leave whenever bored or invite other friends to join. Meanwhile, a camera discreetly records the event by adapting to the occurrences and reacting to the unexpected developments of the evening. As night takes over, drunkenness and tiredness ease away social restraints and reservations, overcoming shyness and slowing down reactions.

The narrative is developed though the use of two voices, two abstract characters speaking over the top of the images.

Paul Becker and Francesco Pedraglio, La Debacle, HD video, 15' 39'', London 2014

Cinematographer: Giorgio Bosisio; Gaffer/Focus puller: Euijeong Hong; With: Nat Carey, Robert Carter, Cristen Clague-Reading, Lily Johnson; First voiceover: Jess Weisner; Second voiceover: Alex Thomas

Three loosely interconnected sketches around the performative nature of both viewership and authorship, with a particular focus on their relationship with power and reciprocal control.

N.B. First two and half minutes are just voice-over (no images).

The malady of telling and being told (4:3), 12' 20'', 2014

The camera is dragged through the studio twice, once during day, once during night, both times creating juxtapositions and involuntary narratives with its slow, apparently-random pace.

As if playing the part of a film’s interval, the two actions are separated by a third moment in which the walls of the buildings around the city become another space for creating sounds and imagining stories.

Seriously now… laugh!; HD video, 17’ 03’’, Mexico City/London, 2013

With Maria Paz Correa Escalante, Gabriel Rosas Aleman and Leonel Salguero; Camera by Ivan Javier; Produced during a residency at De Sitio, Mexico City, 2013.