Marco Brambilla

Hi，My name is Marco Brambillia . And I'm very excited to show two works from the Megaplex series here at Fotographiska in Shanghai. This will be the first time any of my work has been showing in Mainland China. These two works relate specifically to film sampling and idea of creating a kind of hyper spectacle from different film samples.

The first work is entitled <Heaven's Gate>. This was made in 2021. It was actually made during the lockdown. And for this work, I sampled approximately 400 film samples into a vertical tabloid that refers to a doltish purgatorio so it has seven levels to the work. Each level depicts a different phase of civilization. It's all told through pop culture imagery so each section of the work depicts the very primal man coming up to a civilization, and coming up to the Industrial Revolution, then the births of capitalism, and then finally the top section where it becomes much more excessive, and much more about consumerism, and the kind of tipping point of civilization so we open the work with the character which is shown against black. And this character ascends into a state of chaos so as the work travels from level to level and each landscape becomes more and more dense with imagery. This character eventually disappears into this kind of sea of chaos. And the impression I would like to give with the work is to call attention to our current media landscape, and how much sensory overload we experience in our everyday lives, and to reprocess this into something that creates a condition of how much information could we actually absorb relating specifically to using film samples to do so. It celebrates spectacles so it's definitely a work which is a maximal work, but it also comments on spectacles so this idea of spectacle by itself being a fairly empty emotional experience, so it has this dual kind of sensations that I'm hoping people take away from seeing the work. One is this kind of excitement and energy that you get from the sheer amount of information to choreography of all the pieces in it. And the other component is this kind of distance that you feel from being overloaded with imagery, so the concept of the work is very much an execution of the work itself. So, we have both those states coexisting.

Within the work which is called <Heaven's Gate>, the reason I named it <Heaven's Gate> is there was a film made by Michael Cimino which was the film that bankrupted the movie studio, United Artists. And it was the death of the Auteur theory of film directors, and part of this work is also commenting on the fact that narrative and originality have become sometimes secondary to spectacle in mainstream cinemas when mainstream Hollywood cinema today. We see many more repetition of the same things the same stories told in a very repetitive way, so the elements to innovation and originality is somewhat being lessened by the progress of multiplex of film theaters and now streaming services or comments on that as well.

The second piece is entitled <King Size>. This is much more specific. I chose Las Vegas and Elvis Presley as to milestones in American culture, so the piece was made originally for the largest screen in the world which is in Las Vegas at a place called the Sphere, and it was shown during the opening of the Spher. I see it very much as a site specific work so we're looking at the birth of Las Vegas , and the death of Elvis Presley as these two simultaneous events that I chose to depict as victims of their own consumption, so the Disneyland aspect of Las Vegas having become much more excessive, and much more of a kind of simulacrum, and the idea of that same excess having killed the first celebrity that America ever had ever. Elvis Presley was actually one of the first celebrities we ever had so it's very interesting for me to show these works in China because these are works both reflect on tropes and concepts of Americana, and this kind of different visions of the American Dream, and how the American Dream has a positive side and an entertaining side but also a negative side that sometimes can be quite dark and can collapse under its own weight so it chooses two completely different ways to express similar themes and visuals are also quite different but I hope that people seeing the two works together will take away this snapshot of two different few points of the American Dream. One expressed through cinema and one more specifically expressed through the myth of Elvis Presley and the birth of Las Vegas.

The title the show is <Double Feature> which is an old method of showing films in the mostly the 50s and 60s where movie theaters would show two films for the price of one so in this case I'm showing these two art pieces which are derived from film in the same viewing so you'll be able to see both pieces as a <Double Feature> here at Fotografiska.