Vittorio Corsini

Trailer

2019

Inspired by Peccioli's Cinema Passerotti, Fabio Genovesi created for us The Mass in cinemascope.
Narrated by the author himself, the story can be listened to in "Trailer", the new installation by
Vittorio Corsini inside the former cinema in town. The artist works on one of the seats placed in the
stalls, creating a sort of "fantastic" place which transports us into a timeless dimension of sound and
vision, thanks to the interaction with the visitors. The memories of Genovesi as a child become
collective memory and the voice of the author magically becomes the one of the cinema: "(...)
suddenly the lights turned off and a loud music started from the loudspeakers; so, I would go back
there with my eyes wide open, and I would hold tight to the wood of the seat, ready for a new mass
in honour of my favourite deities, who were Godzilla, King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein and other
fabulous monsters. (...) And back then, the films were magical, and they really resembled superior
and venerable entities. In fact, they were waiting for you there, in their temple, and it was you who
had to go there and worship them. In cinemas, which were many in every city and town, but also in
the smallest and most remote places, those in which you passed by chance, maybe even by mistake;
you cannot imagine the priceless, lopsided beauty of the people who live there, unique and
whimsical, with a mind seething with crazy and at the same time brilliant ideas, which one has
never time to consider in the city.

Tiziano Scarpa: "that metal seat, an exception among the others in light wood. There is always a
dissident thinker in the crowd that obeys the dictatorship of the image. There is always someone
who gets distracted and hears another voice inside himself - like the one resounding in the room
now. Someone who takes a step back, sees himself from the outside and starts to reflect on what he
is experiencing right there, sitting amidst everyone, and instead of looking at the screen, he points
his eyes somewhere else, in the air, high up, where the thought swirls into a spiral of light ”.

Pietro Gaglianò: "In the New Cinema Passerotti, the only non-religious building among those
involved in the project, the voice of Fabio Genovesi stages the emotion of a centuries-old drama:
"my church was the Garden Cinema". Along the homogeneous row of wooden folding chairs stands
the one replaced by Corsini, in a slightly off-center position, in the second sector of the small
parterre. Identical to the others in the form, in the rank alignment and in the easy seating
mechanism, so familiar to anyone who has spent time in the darkness of old movie theatres, it
detaches from the continuity due to its material: a polished stainless steel, shiny and clear. Its
surface reflects the light of a neon spiral installed on the ceiling (another recurring medium in the
artist's work). With its infinite motion, the spiral recalls the playing of those films that once, when
the author was a child and then a teenager, could be watched several times, entering after the
beginning or exiting before the second or third finale. Corsini and Genovesi compose a secular and
joyful liturgy that invokes the profound meaning of religion: saving from all sins and above all
"from the most serious of all, which is wasting one's life in the greyness of boredom", as we hear at
the end of The Mass in cinemascope”.

Bibliography

VOCI un coro a Peccioli per un progetto di Vittorio Corsini, con una narrazione di Tiziano Scarpa e un testo critico di Pietro Gaglianò, Gli Ori 2021, Pistoia.