Luca Buvoli's project for the 52nd International Venice Biennale begins with the prediction, "There will be a very beautiful day after tomorrow." Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism, the avant-garde movement that brought Italy up to speed with Modernism and into a controversial relationship with Fascism tried to reassure his daughter with these hopeful words near the end of his life.
In A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani), Buvoli uses Marinetti's message as a point of departure, creating a series of free associations relating to velocity and flight themes central to the artists recent work. This dynamic project melds personal and historical narratives with abstracted forms, yielding drawings, sculptures, installations and animated videos.
For Buvoli, the euphoria of flight is as spectacular as the danger. The project's initial phase, Anachroheroism, explores aesthetic and well as political aspects of aeronautics. Dynamic vector lines and an idealized, mechanized flying human shape surround the viewer upon entering the Arsenale, while hand-made Propaganda Posters and words rendered in mosaic and resin rise along the walls. The style of these works deflates myths of velocity, virility and violence with hesitant language, non-heroic content, and fading colors.
The second phase of Buvoli's project, Entanglement of Modernist Myths, hangs in the cylindrical room. The flight trails of the initial Vector --large lines and beams made of resin-- soar upward and weave between a large resin marquee spelling out the project title before becoming entangled and falling to the floor. A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani), a video inside the cylinder, begins as Vittoria Marinetti recounts her father's prophecy. As Vittoria fades out, the video lyrically transitions between animated segments and archival footage of political rallies and air shows.
Velocity Zero is presented in two anterooms just off the main cylinder and comprises the third phase, Aphasia, of Buvoli's project. Created with the assistance of speech-language pathologists, Buvoli recorded individuals who have aphasia or stutter reading the Manifesto of Futurism. Their slowed speech — transformed into fragmented animated sequences — mirrors the readers' attempts to fluently capture the text. Their moving struggle deflates the Manifesto's praise of speed and aggression, and continues Buvoli's re-reading and derailing of Futurism from a post-utopian perspective.
The fourth phase of Buvoli's project, Monument to Movement, a documentary/animation, "How Can This Thing Be Explained?" (Come si puó spiegare questa cosa?) lies just outside the cylinder. This two-channel video compiles selected interviews the artist made with two of Marinetti's daughters and with Futurist scholars in both Italy and the United States to examine the Futurists' problematic attitudes towards violence as well as their conflicted views on the role of women.
A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow Bellissimo Dopodomani continues Buvoli's overall project, Flying Practical Training, initiated in 1997, and echoes themes from his previous project, Not-a-Superhero. The artist envisions this project as a Futurism without optimism: a critical revisitation of the movement that is part of his cultural heritage, as well as a memory of his nation's political history and of his own personal history (he grew up watching aerial exhibitions, brought by his father --a pilot interned in prison camps by the Germans in the last two years of World War II). Meta-Futurism is Buvoli’s response to the question of what can an artist do in these problematic times of returning demagogy and of manipulations of heroic ideals through the media, as he experienced in Italy and the United States. The artist hopes that this re-exploration of his country’s recent history and culture would help to question the authoritarian and threatening side of our fascination with the future, velocity and power, and would warn us against its seduction and its actual dangers.