Developed during a residency at Milan’s Casa degli Artisti, the Garibaldi 99 project focuses on archival materials and oral sources related to the cinema theatre situated in Corso Garibaldi 99 – a few metres from the residency’s location. The cinema was known under several names: as the Garibaldi Cinema (1906-1962), the Paris Cinema (1964-1989) and as Multisala Brera (1994-2008). Functioning as a neighbourhood cinema, it was an important cultural and meeting place for local inhabitants.
An installation aims to link together heterogeneous archival materials with layers of images, projections, sound and videos. A digital collage of a photograph and a blueprint of the cinema from the 60s is projected onto the wall. The sentence “Thus the silent dreams entered in the room” from Carlo Emilio Gadda’s 1931 short-story, Cinema, becomes a luminous trace projected in the room that evokes the primitive experience of movie-going. A story told by a spectator becomes visual material again in the video fregüja, which is related to the presence of a Motta shop and the consumption of sweets during the films. Five parallel podcasts – Piazzale Loreto, Marialuisa, Cinema Garibaldi/Paris/Brera, Fregüja and Gadda – offer insights into the artistic research process. A grey binder contains fragments of related books, archival documents, interview and podcast transcripts, emails, and miscellaneous notes. In this way the research process and the failed attempts are valorised, showing the difficulties of historical investigation and restitution.
