Publication documenting the pilot episode of a series of video works by Invernomuto that avails itself of the structure and production processes of a TV series. This episode deals with the true story of a conflict between natives and settlers in New Zealand during the eighties.
Calendoola: UTU is the pilot episode of Calendoola, an ongoing series of works that avails itself of the structure and production processes of a TV series. Invernomuto's first foray into fiction, the twenty-minute-long UTU was developed and filmed entirely at Gluck50, Milan. Within it, acting (the work is shot in Italian, English, and Spanish) and performance are parasitized and coexist seamlessly.
The narrative framework and screenplay stem from a loose adaptation of the Ngati Dread trilogy of books, in which the journalist Angus Gillies closely—if somewhat biasedly—reports on the events that took place in Ruatoria, New Zealand, between 1985 and 1990. This true story of conflict between the inhabitants of the village and a group of Maori Rastafarians encapsulates archetypal clash dynamics between natives and settlers, the displaced and the presumed landowners. In UTU, the exaggeration of the mise-en-scène (thanks in part to the massive use of postproduction effects) adds layers of complexity to the interpretation of real events. The result is a hybrid of the two, or an intermittent sequence in which one seamlessly gives way to the other. Calendoola also breaks free of the frame to generate props, costumes, sculptures, and installations.
The Calendoola series aims to depict particular events, and at the same time be a context-specific organism permeable to the influences (historical, aesthetic, political, linguistic) peculiar to different situations. Upcoming episodes will be produced in different informal and institutional circumstances, with the overarching plot and characters proceeding, but contextual specificities leaking in.
Invernomuto is the name of the artistic personality created in 2003 by (born 1983 in Piacenza) and Simone Trabucchi (born 1982 in Piacenza). Invernomuto is the author of a series of research projects structured in time and space, from which cycles of interconnected works derive. On a common theoretical basis, Invernomuto tends to think in an open and rhizomatic manner, developing different outputs that take the form of moving images, sounds, performative actions and publishing projects, within the framework of a practice defined by the use—as diffuse as it is precise—of different media. Reality is observed according to documentaristic principles and interests, but for the purpose of creating an imaginative and almost abstract representation, which offers wide margins for reflection and critical interrogation. In particular, Invernomuto investigates subcultural universes, moving through different practices, in which the vernacular language is one way of approaching and appreciating oral cultures and contemporary mythologies, observed with a gaze that aspires to be cross-fertilised and regenerated by it. The declared inauthenticity of some of the materials used plays a fundamental role in this process, which underlines not only the real but also the fictitious and distorted nature of the realities that Invernomuto explores. Founders of the record label and music organization Hundebiss, both artists also develop individual lines of research, with the musical projects Palm Wine and STILL.
