Output details

Everything Made Bronze

Everything Made Bronze is a 13 minute, 16mm film shot in one of the most renowned of architect Carlo Scarpa's buildings, the Gipsoteca plaster-cast gallery in the Museo Canova, in Possagno, Italy. Commisioned by Film and Video Umbrella, the project has been funded by The Arts Council of England, a research fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute, and a research grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.

Shot on two separate occasions in autumn and late summer, and using a static spring-wound camera, the film follows the play of light in the Gipsoteca as it produces a constantly fluid and changing environment for the exhibition of Canova's plaster-casts and small-scale terracotta maquettes. Employing the camera as an investigative tool, and taking advantage of the specific qualities of a resolutely analogue process, the film accentuates Scarpa's revelatory use of glass vitrines and changing natural light conditions. This use produces near-cinematic multiple reflections, refractions, montages, naturally occurring super-impositions, and dramatic atmospheric effects.

Everything Made Bronze emphasizes the camera’s ability to produce ambiguities of scale, depth or shallowness, and counter-intuitive forms of transparency and reflection. It emphasises the altered forms of attention, and the the resulting intensity of looking, that come from using the camera to magnify and study architectural details and fleeting atmospheric effects.

The film was exhibited as a gallery installation, with a small-scale acrylic and gold leaf model of the Gipsoteca, at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London (2013), and at the Satellite Gallery, Nagoya, Japan, as part of The Aichi Triennale 2013; and screened with a live piano accompaniment at the Megi House, Megayima Island, Japan, as part of The Setouchi Triennale of Art and Music, 2013.