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For An Urban Story, I asked a friend who lives in a small city in Northern Italy, to make me a guide tour in his
car around the place. Invited to show the sights related to his personal experience and memory of the place,
rather than those representative city-sights of historical and cultural importance, he introduce the urban landscape
through mixture of general information, anecdotes and comments.
Shot in a straightforward documentary style, An Urban Story explores the relationship between personal and
collective space and their ways of interaction in the everyday. How their bonding is put in act by the fragments
of architectural forms and individual interpretations of the socio-historical context shaping our living space.
An Urban Story subsequently developed in a video triology, adding to the first video other two pieces, filmed
in two different places (a town in England and a city in Germany) and featuring different protagonists (an older
men and a girlfriend) with different relations to the places (a naturalised immigrant and a recent homecommer).
However the videos keep the same narrational structure and concept.
The narrators always remain out of frame, leaving the panoramic views from the car windows to unfold in
front of the camera. Their 'storytelling' and the 'scrolling' urban landscapes weave the apparent anonymity of
each, to portrait not as much a particular location or person, but rather a more general problematic of historical
legacies, urbanisation, transformation, and the questions of home, displacement and alienation in our
society, in this case particularly the Western European context. The one, yet, away from those globally wellknown
metropolises, often depicted as emblematic to identify our contemporary condition.
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An Urban Story
2010
single-channel video
DVPAL 16:9, colour-sound
16:00 min
video stills from An Urban Story
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