Alterità Film Festival Introduction

The Ferrari Arts Foundation has begun planning for the first iteration of Alterità––a site-specific outdoor film festival and curated conversation between artists and community utilizing public space for interaction, focusing on built environments in moments of transition, to present contemporary works that expand the boundaries of cinematic language and can lead to dialogs regarding the divisive times we are living in.

Engaging the Ferrari family’s legacy of cultivating interactions in public and private space, Alterità illuminates our relationships to physical space by projecting a curated selection of films in public spaces undergoing significant change that hold environmental and sociopolitical concerns.

The multi-national Alterità festival curated by Marco G. Ferrari is conceived to illuminate dialogue around the concept of alterity: exploring how we understand and relate to those who are seen as different, and how this “otherness” shape’s identity and social relations. The politics of “otherness” form power relations at the root of current racial, gender and class-based divisions that have violently shaped our natural and built environments and are influencing our future.

This festival is a response to our shared physical world and the personal experiences of the Ferrari family. As an immigrant family that created a home on the Southside of Chicago in the socially and politically charged 1960s, they experienced an “otherness” in their day to day lives. In making a home and life in art, Virgino and Marisa created spaces that catalyzed reflections and observations highlighting where divisions are seen and felt while also providing an opportunity to dissolve them through dialogues. Continuing to curate spaces that encourage the possibility of such dialogues became the defining legacy of Marisa and Virginio and their sons, and the ongoing work of the family-run foundation created in their name.

Mission:

Alterità is an outdoor traveling film festival that utilizes public space for interaction dedicated to presenting contemporary films that expand the boundaries of cinematic language through innovative form and content.

Taking place in the centro sociale ExSnia in the eastern part of Rome, where the Ferrari’s have cultivated collective artistic projects, and traveling to South Works on the southeast of Chicago, an area close to the Ferrari’s adopted South Side home after immigrating to the city in the 60s, the annual traveling festival seeks to illuminate our relationships to place within locations that hold environmental and sociopolitical concerns.

Through a mix of screenings, performances, discussions, dinners and workshops, Alertità creates a bridge for artists and the public to engage and form dialogs. In a global landscape increasingly shaped by privatized self-interest and the dismissal of so-called “others”, Alterità aspires to cultivate a new relationship to our public spaces where perspectives (both within ourselves and in relation to the world around us) can be explored face to face.

Goals:

– That the festival begins in Rome every year with a series of curated new works that would be screened outdoors over a series of summer nights. These selections will then be screened the following year in Chicago with an addition of new works. And that this cycle would then repeat.

– That the festival can hold film workshops (theory and production) and inspire work to be submitted in the following year or for the Chicago version. 

– To begin modestly and simply but build collaborations/support with other institutions, associations and networks in Rome and Chicago.

Vision:

Alterità encourages community engagement with unique urban public spaces that hold architectural reminders of previous eras of human industry in conversation with our ever-present relationship to the natural world. An engagement with our transience can bring a new perspective to modern demands and navigations of space around industrial and residential imperatives, highlighting the value of undeveloped space for all living beings in the urban environment.

By presenting art works in these spaces we create the opportunity to raise societal questions around our ability to place people and the environment at the center of our focus rather than prioritizing profit. By bringing the story of ExSnia/Bullicante to Chicago’s South Works, the artists and audience that form the Alterità festival have the opportunity to create a new ongoing relationship to the spaces we collectively occupy. 

Alterità will leverage art to facilitate an awareness of the relationships between maker and viewer, image and environment, engaging art as a means to bring people together with the environment to challenge the “otherness” we share. Production and exhibition methods developed in the Third Cinema movement inspire the repurposing of politically charged spaces currently navigating public and private interests for cinema and dialogue.