Catalogue de l’exposition présentée le 18 février 2019 au Palais des Nations à Genève sous l’égide des Nations Unies et de la Mission Permanente de l’Italie auprès des Institutions internationales.

L’exposition

 

1. A world circus: the creative freedom of the artist who transgresses any form of authority or conventional means of expression. Fellini imposed on cinema an essential modernity and a fantasy off limits. The theme of the circus travels the movies as a creative space where everything appears to be allowed. From La Strada(1954) to Otto e mezzo(1963), Fellini leaves the neo-realism with its social ideology to express a personal world. The reference to the circus still remains until to the last movie (La voce della luna, 1990) as an area of liberty, fantasy and satire of the contemporary world.

 

2. The cinema behind the history: with his profound originality and poesy Fellini re-imagines the history, from antiquity to contemporary age. His movies propose subjective interpretations of crucial and sensitive periods, such as World War I (E la Nave va, 1983), the radical changes of 1960s or the great fears of the Cold War (La dolce vita, 1960), the Roman antiquity (Roma, 1972, Satyricon, 1969). Like Picasso, Fellini is the visionary artist of the XXthcentury who is always questioning us about our memory of past, between nostalgia and oblivion.

 

3. Inside the Maestro’screative process: an interactive experience. This area is an opportunity for the visitors to approach, thanks to a choice of original documents of the Fellini Foundation’s Collection (15’000 items), the creative process of the Maestro, step by step, from the beginning (drawings, script, casting) to the making of the film on the set. Involved in the process of creation the visitors will be able to explore the inspiration and the artistic skills of a demiurge. Fellini is also a great painter of the humanity and he is firstly attracted to magnify the life of common people and often rejected persons (La Strada, 1954; Le notti di Cabiria, 1957; Il bidone, 1955). This capacity to transfigure the humanity with such a strong goodwill moves closer Fellini to Chaplin. “He was”, said Federico Fellini at the time Chaplin died, ''a sort of Adam from whom we are all descended.'' 

 

In world premiere The Fellini Digital Wallis an extension of the digital archive, completed in November 2015 as part of the exhibition, Fellini: Circus of Lightpresented in the NTU (Nanyang Technological University) Singapore. The digital archive at present provide resources on the creatives out of Federico Fellini. It includes filmography, articles and more. With plans to expand the digital archive further with more digital artefacts, the digital wall project aims to explore new approaches of visualisation to extend the discoverability and accessibility of the archive content. It presents a snapshot of the digital archive by randomly selecting 100 artefacts of certain criteria from the digital archive, visualised in a form of a collage, which can be changed at certain intervals. Users can also digitally “touch” the images from the archive to explore more. This project is jointly supported by the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM), Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity (NISTH) and Office of Information, Knowledge and Library Services (OIKLS) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.