Encantada Post-Porno International Video Art Festival

Curated by Piero Deggiovanni

In an era marked by severe limitations on individual freedoms and by the reduction of constitutionally guaranteed rights to mere governmental concessions, this video art festival seeks to explore the historical continuity and contemporary awareness surrounding one of the most intimate—and at the same time most political—freedoms that can still be openly discussed: sexuality and the behaviors connected to it.

Personal freedoms are not to be theorized but practiced, and this is possible only after a process of formation, an education toward freedom, capable of unveiling the political instrumentalization of concepts such as tolerance and inclusion—often used hypocritically for the exclusive benefit of certain social groups by a pseudo left inclined toward transhumanism, that is, toward the denial of differences and the promotion of an ambiguous, imposed identity fluidity. Such a stance denies rather than supports the principle of individuation and the right to sexual self-determination. Diversity, on the contrary, is richness, and precisely for this reason it generates fear and is opposed by those who would like us to be asexual automatons, standardized and deprive d of personal identity. Re-educating oneself to freedom means freeing oneself from ideological enclosures used as defensive bastions against society, recovering the intimate sphere and one’s own personal, autonomous, biographical, and unique history, in conflict with the homogenization of customs.

In this regard, it is useful to recall the thought of Herbert Marcuse, expressed in his book Eros and Civilization [1955, 1966], in which—by bringing together Freud and Marx—he highlighted the close correlation between psychology and politics, asserting the necessity of de -ideologizing sex and sexuality in order to safeguard identity pluralism without generating further conflicts. Such conflicts, inevitably, would be exploited by the Establishment to achieve its ultimate goal: biopolitical control over peop le’s lives and behavioral choices, transformed into commodities. Identity pluralism must be defended and protected, but not through attitudes rooted in hatred or contempt for biological paradigms, going so far as to deny them or to manipulate developing consciences. A true process of liberation recognizes the psychological singularity of each individual, respects and nurtures it, defending it from cultural homogenization and from ideologies propagated through standardized, commodified, and alienated clichés—precisely those that, since the 1960s, various feminist and gay sexual liberation movements have theorized and practiced through militant antagonism. The screening is introduced by an imaginative prologue linked to the sexual customs of the 1960s and 1970s, featuring fragments and works by Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Carolee Schneemann, and Valie Export . It will then continue with an overview of contemporary international audiovisual productions, illustrating imaginaries and political statements—albeit expressed in metaphorical form—by internationally recognized artists: Alessandra Caccia, Chocolate Remix, Giulia Costantini, Silvia De Gennaro, Santiago Echeverry, Anne Hirsch, Francesca Lolli, Sara Lorusso, MRZB, Nicolas Provost, Pipilotti Rist, Saul Saguatti, Donato Sansone, Venus Soberanes, and Cosimo Terlizzi.