Carmelo Bene. Là dove muore, canta is the work of the artist Rä di Martino and she comes to terms with the memory of
Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), through his archive materials.
From a documentary heritage made up of videos, audios, photographs, manuscripts and some six thousand volumes from his own personal library, di Martino sets out to develop a cycle bringing Bene's figure and work back to life. Rä di Martino enters the phantasmagorical library of the actor and playwright, books with which he had an osmotic relationship, as an obsessive reader, annotating their pages. With a series of frontal photographic images, the artist focuses on the most studied pages, full of his scribbles and Post-its. She also goes through the actor's diaries where he penned a work on Dracula that remained unfinished, and which the artist decided to photograph in its entirety. The volume also features an introductory text by Brizia Minerva and a critical contribution by Chiara Valerio.
Rä di Martino (born 1975 in Rome, lives and works in Italy) studied at the Chelsea College of Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art in London before moving to live in New York between 2005 and 2010. Her film, video installations and photos have been shown in many institutions such as the Tate Modern, London; MoMA PS1, New York; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; GAM and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin; MACRO and MAXXI in Rome; Museion, Bolzano; MCA, Chicago; MALI, Lima; Bronx Museum and Artists Space in New York; Kunsthalle Athena, Athens;
Le Magasin, Grenoble; HangarBicocca and PAC in Milan. She has featured at Manifesta 7, at the Busan Biennale and the Turin Triennial, and has participated in many international film festivals including the Locarno Film Festival, KunstFilmBiennale, Viper Basel, Transmediale.04, New York Underground Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Impakt Festival and the Turin Film Festival, and took part in the Venice International Film Festival, winning the SIAE Award in 2014, the Gillo Pontecorvo award and a Nastro d'Argento for best docufilm 2015.
