RÄ
DI
MARTINO
words by forty
R.I.P. FU†URE ________________________________________________
When I watched the first installment of the Star Wars series as a kid, I simply couldn’t spin my mind around on how they were able to actually create these worlds that were revealing themselves in front of me on the big screen. Admittedly, some of the solutions I was coming up with were rather ludicrous, but actually not as absurd as Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine being a four hour flight away from where I lived. Italian filmmaker and visual artist Rä di Martino recently visited the forgotten film sets in Chott el Djerid, Tunisia, which to her surprise remained in brilliant condition due to the sands protection, even 35 years after the last scene had been shot.
“I moved to London to study, but stayed there for almost ten years, then I won a bursary to stay in NY for one year and my life moved there. So it goes that my life was drawn back to Italy a couple of years ago, I also missed it a lot to be honest, but I now live in Turin - not my hometown Rome. I am definitely drawn to moving images, and I consider it my main medium, but recently I am very excited to experiment with different kinds of installations because it’s a newer and fresher approach for me.“
2013 manifests itself to be a busy year for her, as she’s not only finishing the script to her first feature film, but has to prepare her solo shows in London and Bozen as well, which will happen in the second half of this year.
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“I accidentally found out about some film props in the deserts of Tunisia from some movies, possibly Star Wars. I thought it would make powerful images, you know, ruins of film props in the middle of the desert... especially as the movies created a specific vision of the future. So I set out to go to Tunisia and found these three locations of Star Wars sets in very different conditions in two salt deserts. In a European country it would be unthinkable to leave a film set standing and simply let it decay on public ground... but these were in deserts, in the middle of nowhere and obviously there is less control from any kind of authority.“
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