Catalogue > At random

Around 1920, a wealthy man from northern Italy returns from the First World War. Without having actively fought, neither having seen the blood of battle or an actual trench, he asks a group of people to stage for his camera scenes from the war as he imagined it. In 2024, four individuals are asked, in an attempt at freezing time, to didactically re-enact the scenes already staged in the 1920s photographs. In the corridors of a war museum housing a series of dioramas depicting war landscapes without figures, the endless cycle of the representation of war unfolds in an infinite suspended moment.

Giulio Squillacciotti is an artist and film-director born in Rome in 1982, living and working in Milan. After an education in Medieval Art History and Humanities in Rome and Barcelona, he studied Visual Arts at the University of Architecture in Venice. He was a fellow resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and one of the artists of the Dutch pavilion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale. His work is oriented mainly on the invention and mutation of traditions by merging together fiction and historical facts. Using film, documentary, sound and scenography, Squillacciotti produces research-based investigations that revisits history, crafting new stories from subjective perspectives, religion, language and popular culture. He is currently working on his first fiction feature film, co-produced among Italy, Ireland and Poland, project recipient, so far, of the MEDIA Creative Europe Grant and the Screen Ireland writing fund.