Alive, and where. I don’t know when we’ll see each other again with friends, I don’t know when or how we’ll return to this world. To think of the world in these days of confinement. The world, not the information flowing like a short circuit. The world in which to get lost and find ourselves. In need of voices, places, presences, I resumed work on two short films, shot just before (in another era). They are two preludes that answer each other from afar, as in a dyptic. The suburbs of Lima and the Serra de Arrabida near Lisbon, the silence and noise of the city, in the silence of the mountain of voices, in the voices of the crowd the silence.—Giovanni Cioni

L’Île aux voix (The Island of Voices) is a Polynesian tale by Robert Louis Stevenson about a beach, the invisible voices you hear there, and the fires that light up on the beach. Giovanni Cioni conceived of this tale during a workshop at the Serra de Arrabida, near Lisbon, at the invitation of Marta Wengorovius’ Escola Nomada. The artist then remembered a photo taken on the Serra de Arrabida in August 2007 and wanted to make a location scouting around the spot where this photo was taken—as if to find those invisible voices of time.

Cinco Soles is a compilation of voices taken from the Puente de Acho, a pedestrian bridge linking the historic centre of Lima to the Indian suburb of Rimac. A bridge, a market, a place of passage. It is a collection of desynchronized voices, voices of passers-by, vendors, children, preachers, as if through these voices of the living, silence emerges. These images were shot in November 2019 in Lima, where Cioni was holding a workshop at the Arguedas Cinema.

A filmmaker of “loss of reference points”, Giovanni Cioni makes unconventional films, where his camera becomes an explorer, transforming the environment within his reach into unknown territory. Among his films, selected and awarded in several international festivals are Non è Sogno (Locarno 2019, Festival dei Popoli 2019), Viaggio A Montevideo (Cinéma du Réel 2016), Dal Ritorno (Cinéma du Réel 2015), Per Ulisse (Visions du Réel 2013, Festival dei Popoli 2013), In Purgatorio, Nous/Autres, Lourdes Las Vegas and La Rumeur du Monde.

Several retrospectives have been devoted to his work, including one in 2011 at Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland) and at Annecy Cinéma Italien in 2019.

These two films have their world premieres on the 5th floor.