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. During those same years, Italian literature entered an important phase for the Resistance Novel — a genre whose narratives are set within partisan groups during the Italian Resistance of the Second World War. For example, Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata, defined by Italo Calvino as “the novel of the Italian Resistance,” was published in 1963, the exact year Asimov’s Foundation Series began to be published in Italy.

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 the Italian Resistance in central Italy took place.

The film's soundtrack comprises extracts from the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, which Asimov adapted into a novel.




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Four Italian former Second World War partisans were asked to choose a sentence from Asimov’s “Foundation Series” and write it 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).