LAWRENCE WEINER
TRACCE / TRACES
The film

“All I do is make things and present them. Art presents a reality. Art doesn’t present a metaphor. The conversation with society is not: what is the function of art? The conversation with society is: what do people do with this stuff that other people make? What do people do with the idea that there are human beings making things and placing them in the world and that those things are just means for other people to understand their relationship to the world?”

Lawrence Weiner 

Starting from 15 July 2024 the film originated from the exhibitions TRACCE / TRACES by American artist Lawrence Weiner is available online.  The exhibition took place in the summer of 2020, thanks to a series of aerial banners along the coast, from Ladispoli to Anzio. 

 

Produced by MACRO, TRACCE / TRACES was the first solo show by an artist ever presented in the sky that showed a different work every day, from 16 to 25 August 2020, along the coastline most popular with Romans, offering each viewer the possibility – unexpected, for most – of coming into contact with works of art outside the context in which they are usually displayed and observed. 

 

In the film, produced in collaboration with RingFilm, the interpretations and reactions of the public join the artist’s voice and the documentation of the exhibition, articulated through the day to day apparitions of this unique and ephemeral experience. 

The exhibition, devised by Luca Lo Pinto, links back to the book of the same title produced in 1970 for Galleria Sperone, edited by Germano Celant, who focused on translation. Exactly fifty years after the release of the publication, the artist has selected ten of the fifty works included in the book. They all consist of a single word, corresponding to the past participle of a verb that, isolated and removed from any syntactic context, lend themselves to open interpretation.

 

Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021) has been one of the leading figures of the contemporary art avant-garde, as well as one of the foremost Conceptual artists who contributed in the redefenition of the paradigms of the work of art, its production and distribution. 

 


 

Director: Pietro Daviddi
Voice: Lawrence Weiner
Sound Design: Vittorio Giampietro
Producer: Tommaso Bertani
Production company: Ring Film
Production Manager: Carolina De Nicolo’
Country of production: Italy
Languages: Italian
Subtitles: Carlotta Pierleoni, Izabela Anna Moren, Chiara Siravo
Runtime: 27’