L'altra faccia della spirale
[The Other Side of the Spiral]
film and mixed media installation, 2010-2011

Italian translations of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy, the “Foundation Series,” were published in 1963 and 1964. In the same years, Italian literature entered an important phase for the Resistance Novel, a genre whose narrative takes place in the partisan groups during the Second World War’s Italian Resistance. For example, Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata, defined by Italo Calvino as “the novel of Italian Resistance,” was published in 1963, the exact year Italian translations of Asimov’s Foundation Series started to come out.

L’altra faccia della spirale comprises a film, a series of writings on paper, and an essay.

The film features six Italian former Second World War partisans reading excerpts from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Series”.
In each of the external locations portrayed in the film, an episode connected to central Italy’s Resistance took place.

The soundtrack of the film comprises extracts from 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, which Asimov adapted into a book.




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Four Italian former Second World War partisans were asked to choose a sentence from Asimov’s “Foundation Series” and write them on a sheet of paper.





"Intuition or insight or hunch-tendency, whatever you wish to call it, can be treated as an emotion."





"It was a sign of decaying culture, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas."





"Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer."





"By every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds."






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The installation also comprises an essay on the literary relationships between science fiction and the Resistance Novel.

Exhibited at: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italy (2013); FID Marseille International Film Festival; Palazzo Reale, Milano (2011); Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia (2010).