Frittelli arte contemporanea is pleased to present Tristanoil by Nanni Balestrini, the longest film in the world.

On view in Kassel from 9 June to 16 September for the entire duration of Documenta 13, after 100 days, 2400 hours the projection continued, without interruption, in Milan at the Fondazione Marconi, and continues in the spaces of the Frittelli gallery, accompanied by a series of works on canvas taken from images of the film.

The new cycle will run for the duration of a year through a series of Italian art galleries: Fondazione Marconi in Milan, Frittelli arte contemporanea in Florence, Studio Fabio Mauri in Rome, Galleria Martano in Turin, Galleria Mazzoli in Modena, Fondazione Morra in Naples, Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice, and Palazzo Ducale in Genoa.

Tristanoil is a computer-generated film that reassembles, in sequences of 10 minutes each, more than 150 video clips so that each sequence is different from the other while dealing with the same subject: the destruction of the planet through a predatory use of its resources.

The video pieces selected from the Dallas series, news of ecological disasters, images of the stock exchange, exploitation, misery, war, emerge amalgamating from a flow of golden oil that homologates and reconfigures them in a hypothetically infinite combinatory game.

At the origin of the project is Balestrini's combinatorial novel Tristano, published in 2007 in copies, each one different from the next.

“Already in that novel, all built on the potentially infinite assemblage of varied linguistic materials, Balestrini aimed to undermine the idea of the seriality of the commodity and thus of the artwork reduced to the status of a standardized industrial product. [...] Tristanoil is an epic work of tragic resistance, and it is precisely its abnormal duration that makes it powerful. None of us will ever be able to see this film-event in its entirety, because to do so would entail suspending our existence. It is a work we can embrace in fragments, as if to underline the incommensurability between our individual power and that of the system above us. It is a collective spectator that Balestrini addresses, a community, as if to say that only by uniting our individual experiences we can truly mature a consciousness of the present.” (Gian Maria Annovi, Il Manifesto)

Nanni Balestrini
TRISTANOIL
Videoart: Giacomo Verde; Software: Vittorio Pellegrineschi;
Soundscape: Morgan Bennett; Image Search: NABA
Visual, Multimedia and Performing Arts Department
coordinated by Maresa Lippolis