[Text available only in English] Cine Fantasma is a videointervention and performance piece that explores the way symbolic and material structures interlace themselves with urban landscapes. Through audiovisual collages projected on the surfaces and facades of buildings either abandoned or threatened to disappear, it searches for the significance and importance of the memory that constitutes a local identity. Instead of a nostalgic perspective, it explores the outputs of the montage and projection of images, not based on the spectacle or consumption logics, but on the notions of community and belonging. The material used for the projections is assembled collaboratively – by way of workshops, online and offline search engines, interviews or conjuring – incarnating the collective and affective memory of the location concerned. Therefore, it is a series of researches and interventions in specific locations, having taken place between 2013 and 2014 in various cities in Brazil, and in January 2015 in Berlin, Germany, in the context of the Vorspiel/Transmediale Festival. As if it were some sort of archeology, in the manner that French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, Cine Fantasma pursues in the ruins, detours and fractures of the past the conditions for the possibility of understanding the present and formulating other futures. With this perspective and a site specific proposition for the Live Performance Meeting 2015 Rome, the work integrates itself to the festival’s call.

Cinema Aquila – today known as Nuovo Cinema Aquila – exhibited of many great classics of Italian cinema which contributed to the formation of the collective unconscious around modern Cinema. Placed in the historical working-class neighbourhood of Prenestino-Labicano, the old movie theatre, restored and restructured by the Comune di Roma, is still a symbol not only of the victory over organized crime, but also against the death of non-multiplex, street movie theatres. In this way, the videointervention project by Cine Fantasma proposes a dreamlike historical revisionism not only of Nuovo Cinema Aquila, but also of the region it belongs to. According to Pasolini, in Film it is hardest to distinguish the “language of prose” from the “the language of poetry” because we can’t clearly understand what is the “language of film”. Appropriating and remixing images and sounds extracted from some of the main works by masters of cinema such as Fellini, de Sica and Rosselini, the performance follows the steps of Pasolini through the streets of Pigneto and the Cinema of Poetry. In this spectre of ghostly facts, it will pass through the era of dominance by the mafia, the big openings, the crisis started at the end of the 70s, the transformation into a porn movie theatre and the reappropriation by the city under law 109.

The closing of traditional movie theatres can be observed in multiple cities, either in the Americas or in Europe, and can be related to contexts of crises in film distribution and exhibiting systems, to the advent of television, home video and the internet, or to the phenomenon of real estate speculation. Facing this conclusion, our proposition aims to celebrate the longevity of Cinema Aquila, as a focus of the region’s resistance and an affirmation of its cultural identity. On its webpage, one can read that the “process of restituting the theatre to the city is a symbol of democracy and participation”. In this spirit, we propose an intervention that will count on the direct participation of moviegoers, aficionados, enthusiasts, memoirists and defenders of street theatres. Our intention is to incorporate in this remix in real time, tweets, photos, videos and sounds sent by internet users through the collaborative MidiaMagia Net Art Platform, developed in Brazil by artist Denise Agassi, member of Coletivo Fantasma (“ghost collective”) in São Paulo. Our collective in Rome will be composed by Brazilian artist and performer Paola Barreto, as the master of ceremony Dr. Fantasma; by British DJ and sound designer David Cole and by Brazilian VJ Lucas Canavarro. As Andre Bazin once said, "Cinema is still to be invented". We hope, with this intervention in Cinema Aquila, to contribute to the creation of a live cinema filled with poetry, invention and resistance.