ZimmerFrei | Continuo Blue439 | Directions

Stereorama (2004-2015)
Stereoscopic visor, headphones, mp3 player / Courtesy Monitor

The series of Stereorama viewers is a project in progress to which new views are being added from time to time. Beginning with Rome, it was then the turn of Brussels, New York and Tanaeck, New Jersey and now Den Haag.
They are  images in which the third dimension is generated by the brain as it combines the small difference in perspective between two slides. The fourth dimension, time, is created by the soundtrack that accompanies each image. Stereorama lets itself be looked at in depth; it is a camera obscura that can be lived in, as immersive as a magic box, a théâtre optique in miniature. The photos are still but running towards the cinema. 


ZimmerFrei - Fino all'orlo colmi di figure

Fino all’orlo colmi di figure (2011)
Digital print on PVC canvas

This work has travelled a great deal. The flock of sheep was photographed in Barbagia, during the group’s residence at the Museo MAN in Nuoro (Sardinia) in 2006; the trolley on the other hand was made in 2009 for the set of Panorama_Harburg. The panel on wheels was pushed by hand to fill the shot of the city with a visual “trick”, opening up another vista within it, a sort of breathing space in the void. The trolley has arrived here in a magnified version. Mobile poster, further déplacement, coffin headed towards a still unknown destination.


ZimmerFrei - I giorni del cane

ZimmerFrei - I giorni del cane

I giorni del cane (2011)
17 digital prints on wood / Courtesy Monitor

This series of photographs, taken between the summer and the autumn of 2007 on the far outskirts of Rome, a no–man’s land devastated by property speculation, composes a sort of pastorale: land, sky, shacks, shopping centres, storms of starlings, dogs, cats, sheep, fleeces, sun, grass, mud. And life. And death.
It is also a contemporary epiphany: just the other side of a gate lies a very ancient and modern world. From his bullet–proof car the owner of the flock keeps an eye on the Moldavian shepherds who are looking after the animals and doing the dirty job. The Moldavians live with their dogs in a hut of sheet–iron. The boss is always there too: he lives in his car, never getting out. One of the episodes of Ghost Track (2007) was shot in the same place, accompanied by the soundtrack of Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, read in the devilish voice of Annabella Sciorra, a vampire who feels compassion for the victims on which she feeds.


ZimmerFrei - Tomorrow is the question

ZimmerFrei - Tomorrow is the question

Tomorrow is the question (2010)
12 digital prints on wood / Courtesy Monitor

This series of snapshots taken at Coney Island, the original Dreamland, can be interpreted on three planes: the pure landscape, on the boundary between sky, sea and earth; the group of figures passing through it; the outer edges of the city, with its now abandoned works of fantastic architecture. On the neighbouring Brighton Beach, frequented by the Russian community of Brooklyn and seen here as a boundless and poignant golden land in which the signs of a civilization on the wane can be recognized, is portrayed a family belonging to the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement: a young father in shirt and hat of bygone times, the kids scattered over the foreshore or hanging round the neck of a child mother who is wandering along the beach next to another figure with his face painted like an inscrutable Joker.


ZimmerFrei - Hometown | Mutonia

ZimmerFrei - Hometown | Mutonia

Hometown | Mutonia (2013)
Documentary film, full HD, audio stereo / 63 minutes

A documentary film about the Mutoids’ camp in Santarcangelo di Romagna, a medieval little village in the middle of Italy, near Rimini. Mutonia is a strange village inside a village, a temporary town which has been transformed over time, relating to a bigger urban, territorial and social context. It was born out of the anarchic, iconoclastic and experimental spirit of the travellers and cyber punks who founded it; the town has been home to two generations of travellers and has become a place of origin, a “motherland” to come back to, or to stop and raise children.
This original living place, made up of assembled scrap and vehicles transformed at home, now risks extinction, because there is no urban regulation which accounts for such an anomaly, which at its core was created by everyday life and invention, fragility and energy, transgression and the need for roots.


ZimmerFrei - Panorama Roma

Panorama Roma (2004)
Video PAL, audio stereo / 24 Minutes / Courtesy Monitor

The Panorama series – portraits of cities and visualizations of time obtained through the flow of moving images – started in 2004 with Rome. The first site of the project is Piazza del Popolo, a natural stage set in continuous motion where the camera has been set up, like the minute hand of a clock, to complete a 360° revolution over the course of an hour. The result is an extra–ordinary temporal flux, whereby 8 hours of film have been accelerated to a 1:20 ratio, resulting in 24 minutes of time–lapse video. The camera’s eye gradually discovers the site’s hidden identity, encountering strange narcoleptic beings who sleep, stare, act and inhabit the architecture and send mysterious signals while oblivious pedestrians flash precipitously by. The performers move through a parallel temporal landscape in which they experience the dimension of permanence. This flux is charged with visions and omens in which other possibilities of life take form.


ZimmerFrei - Positions


Positions (2014)
12'' Vinyl record

Thirteen tracks selected from an archive of field recordings collected in Europe and U.S. from 2005 to 2013.


ZimmerFrei - Neon Sign

zimmerfrei
Neon Sign (2011)

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ZimmerFrei | Continuo
13.02/10.05 - 2015
Museum Beelden aan Zee
Den Haag

In collaboration with
Istituto Italiano di Cultura - Amsterdam
Monitor - Roma