Michelangelo Frammartino on the Future of Art and Memory

In an interview curated by Spazio Taverna, video artist and filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino (Milan, 1968) discusses his artistic journey, the influence of Studio Azzurro and Paolo Rosa, and his seminal work 'La Casa delle Belle Addormentate'. The installation, created for the Filmmaker festival in 1997, was inspired by Jean Baudrillard's 'The Perfect Crime' and Yasunari Kawabata's novel, depicting a brothel for elderly men with sleeping virgins. Frammartino reflects on the importance of genius loci in his films set in Calabria, his family's origin, emphasizing the region's contradictory nature of ancient heritage and ephemeral temporariness. He advocates for selective viewing in the digital age, recalling advice from architect Corrado Levi to redraw plans by hand. Regarding the sacred in a post-truth era, Frammartino describes his recent research in Calabria citeriore, where immanent rituals dismantled his youthful skepticism, aligning with Gilles Deleuze's call for faith in the tangible world. His works aim to restore a profound connection between humans and their environment, referencing Stanley Kubrick's transformation of a bone into a prosthesis in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. On the future, Frammartino personalizes it through the decision to vaccinate his ten-year-old son Lorenzo.