THE HUMAN TOOLS
360° round-film, 74 min.
color 4K, 2019
Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and Italian Council edition 2018 present THE HUMAN TOOLS
written and directed by Nico Angiuli
'The Human Tools' is a project by the artist Nico Angiuli, curated and promoted by Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, winner of the 3rd edition of Italian Council (2018), a competition conceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP) – an organism of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities to promote Italian contemporary art in the world.
Triggering a reflection on the theme of the humanisation of ‘humanoid’ machines analysing the de-humanisation of the human being: this is one of the objectives of Nico Angiuli’s experimental film – developed through periods of residency and workshops.
In the context of the project, Fondazione Pistoletto hosted workshops which saw the participation of international guests from fields like the worlds of robotic and artificial intelligence, work sociology and investigative journalism. Specifically, the speakers of the meetings were Rosario Sorbello (co-director of Roboticslab – the department of industrial and digital innovation of the University of Palermo), Albert Nikolla (executive director at Coherent Development Albania, Tirana) and Jean-René Bilongo (migration manager for Flai-Cgil).
Nico Angiuli has taken his research into Cittadellarte’s beating heart creating a connection with its spaces and foundations: what role does art assume within the social context? We call ‘connective residency’ the experience allowing Cittadellarte to accommodate the personal research of an artist including it in its own ecology. Nico Angiuli has enriched the research of Cittadellarte’s Work office and had the opportunity to fully immerse himself in the multiple activities of our other Uffizi.” (Paolo Naldini, director of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto)
For about ten years Angiuli has been finely researching on the themes of work exploitation, illegal recruitment and body’s mechanisation in farming, and the role of the new migrants. Like a compulsive archivist, he has been collecting gestures and physical movements reflecting a transformation in the role of labour in the post-industrial era. It’s not a coincidence that Angiuli’s new project also focuses on robots, a term deriving from robota, Czech for ‘forced labourer’.
In this instance we are not powerless spectators, though; we are surrounded by a plethora of characters sharing (human or artificial) existential circumstances in which the body is somehow enslaved. They tell us their unfortunate stories, lamenting them among themselves, and in doing so they seem to comment sarcastically on contemporary life and work conditions, like Rome’s talking statues used to do.
Analysing Nico Angiuli’s entire work, we can definitely identify an element characterising its final outcome: the artist built a close network of relationships with experts in various disciplines (the director of the robotic research centre of the University of Palermo, the manager of the trade unions CGIL who deals with migration, and an Albanian anthropologist, to name a few), organizing public conversations to connect the themes of contemporary forms of enslaved de-humanisation with the humanisation of robotic machines and the human tool.
We could describe this process as a brief educational experience, a school involving all the actors subsequently featuring in the film. For months the artist’s studio at Cittadellarte was in fact animated by a many-voiced debate resembling a sort of permanent brain storming. It is important to emphasise how not only the experts but also the actors played an essential role in this choral experiment: the whole script was in fact based on their personal stories, creating a correspondence between the lives and experiences of the interpreters and the fiction of the narrative.
Programme of presentations of "The Human Tools":
14th March 2019 Italian Institute of Culture in Berlin (Germany) Introducing the project: Matteo Lucchetti
May 2019 Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella (Italy)
Italian Institute of Culture in Jakarta (Indonesia)
Paul Bardwell Gallery of Contemporary Art at Centro Colombo Americano in Medellìn (Colombia)
Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts in Bruxelles (Belgium)
THE HUMAN TOOLS Written and directed by: Nico Angiuli
Actors: Luca Antonello | Eleonora Battaglia | Tatiana Cazzaro | Shahzada Husnain Fiaz | Elena Gugel | Cece Mannazza | Seth Oppong Osuwu | Noemi Ivara | Erica Massaccesi | Graziella Panetta | Kastriot Shehi
Project coordinator: Juan Esteban Sandoval
DoP & Lights design: Giuseppe Valentino
Video editing: Guglielmo Trupia
Visual effects & compositing: Raffaele Fiorella
Make up: Daniela Melis
Costumes: Augusta Tibaldeschi & Roberta Vacchetta
Original soundtrack: Rino Arbore ;
color: Pietro De Tilla;
sound design: Duccio Servi
Boom operator: Nicholas Ferrara
Production: Andrea Abate | Ilaria Bernardi | Clara Tosetti
Exhibition design: Alessandro Vangi
download press release
360° round-film, 74 min.
color 4K, 2019
Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and Italian Council edition 2018 present THE HUMAN TOOLS
written and directed by Nico Angiuli
'The Human Tools' is a project by the artist Nico Angiuli, curated and promoted by Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, winner of the 3rd edition of Italian Council (2018), a competition conceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP) – an organism of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities to promote Italian contemporary art in the world.
Triggering a reflection on the theme of the humanisation of ‘humanoid’ machines analysing the de-humanisation of the human being: this is one of the objectives of Nico Angiuli’s experimental film – developed through periods of residency and workshops.
In the context of the project, Fondazione Pistoletto hosted workshops which saw the participation of international guests from fields like the worlds of robotic and artificial intelligence, work sociology and investigative journalism. Specifically, the speakers of the meetings were Rosario Sorbello (co-director of Roboticslab – the department of industrial and digital innovation of the University of Palermo), Albert Nikolla (executive director at Coherent Development Albania, Tirana) and Jean-René Bilongo (migration manager for Flai-Cgil).
Nico Angiuli has taken his research into Cittadellarte’s beating heart creating a connection with its spaces and foundations: what role does art assume within the social context? We call ‘connective residency’ the experience allowing Cittadellarte to accommodate the personal research of an artist including it in its own ecology. Nico Angiuli has enriched the research of Cittadellarte’s Work office and had the opportunity to fully immerse himself in the multiple activities of our other Uffizi.” (Paolo Naldini, director of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto)
For about ten years Angiuli has been finely researching on the themes of work exploitation, illegal recruitment and body’s mechanisation in farming, and the role of the new migrants. Like a compulsive archivist, he has been collecting gestures and physical movements reflecting a transformation in the role of labour in the post-industrial era. It’s not a coincidence that Angiuli’s new project also focuses on robots, a term deriving from robota, Czech for ‘forced labourer’.
In this instance we are not powerless spectators, though; we are surrounded by a plethora of characters sharing (human or artificial) existential circumstances in which the body is somehow enslaved. They tell us their unfortunate stories, lamenting them among themselves, and in doing so they seem to comment sarcastically on contemporary life and work conditions, like Rome’s talking statues used to do.
Analysing Nico Angiuli’s entire work, we can definitely identify an element characterising its final outcome: the artist built a close network of relationships with experts in various disciplines (the director of the robotic research centre of the University of Palermo, the manager of the trade unions CGIL who deals with migration, and an Albanian anthropologist, to name a few), organizing public conversations to connect the themes of contemporary forms of enslaved de-humanisation with the humanisation of robotic machines and the human tool.
We could describe this process as a brief educational experience, a school involving all the actors subsequently featuring in the film. For months the artist’s studio at Cittadellarte was in fact animated by a many-voiced debate resembling a sort of permanent brain storming. It is important to emphasise how not only the experts but also the actors played an essential role in this choral experiment: the whole script was in fact based on their personal stories, creating a correspondence between the lives and experiences of the interpreters and the fiction of the narrative.
Programme of presentations of "The Human Tools":
14th March 2019 Italian Institute of Culture in Berlin (Germany) Introducing the project: Matteo Lucchetti
May 2019 Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella (Italy)
Italian Institute of Culture in Jakarta (Indonesia)
Paul Bardwell Gallery of Contemporary Art at Centro Colombo Americano in Medellìn (Colombia)
Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts in Bruxelles (Belgium)
THE HUMAN TOOLS Written and directed by: Nico Angiuli
Actors: Luca Antonello | Eleonora Battaglia | Tatiana Cazzaro | Shahzada Husnain Fiaz | Elena Gugel | Cece Mannazza | Seth Oppong Osuwu | Noemi Ivara | Erica Massaccesi | Graziella Panetta | Kastriot Shehi
Project coordinator: Juan Esteban Sandoval
DoP & Lights design: Giuseppe Valentino
Video editing: Guglielmo Trupia
Visual effects & compositing: Raffaele Fiorella
Make up: Daniela Melis
Costumes: Augusta Tibaldeschi & Roberta Vacchetta
Original soundtrack: Rino Arbore ;
color: Pietro De Tilla;
sound design: Duccio Servi
Boom operator: Nicholas Ferrara
Production: Andrea Abate | Ilaria Bernardi | Clara Tosetti
Exhibition design: Alessandro Vangi
download press release
