Hecho en Cuba. Cinema in Cuban graphic design. Posters from the Bardellotto collection
The National Cinema Museum will present Hecho en Cuba. Cinema in Cuban graphic design. Posters from the Bardellotto collection at the Mole Antonelliana (4 February - 29 August 2016), the broadest and most comprehensive exhibition ever organised on Cuban film posters, by curator Luigino Bardellotto, with collaboration from Nicoletta Pacini and Tamara Sillo (National Cinema Museum) and Ivo Boscariol, Patrizio De Mattio and Francesca Zanutto (Cartel Cubano Studies Centre). The items on display are over 200, some being one-off pieces never exhibited before in Europe, recounting the history of Cuban cinematographic graphic design from 1959 to our days.
Cuban graphic design art represents one of the most acclaimed and original schools in the world, reaching the apex of its expression between 1964 and 1980. The watershed in the evolution of its trait and graphic ingenuity was the revolution in 1959. While posters in previous years displayed a style in evident debt to the West, posters after the revolution showed no links with films apart from being an ideal source of inspiration, offering themselves as actual artworks. While social and political solidarity graphic appeared more conditioned by political decisions and control, film graphic design enjoyed greater freedom of expression and a formal autonomy which makes it unique for its ability to combine its reference to artistic avant-garde with figurative and popular symbolic tradition.
With the founding of ICAIC (the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) - which took place a few months after the revolution - graphics designers began to interpret feature films and documentaries arriving from all over the world through a new style, since Fidel Castro focused on film and culture as a means of communication to reach the people.
The exhibition curator is Luigino Bardellotto, and almost all of the mostly unique pieces, especially sketches and layouts, come from his collection, which he assembled during his many trips to Cuba since 1998. Being in love with the island and its culture, he randomly bought his first poster as a souvenir to take home. Intrigued by this graphic design, he began to gather information and became aware of what was behind the creation of carteles de cine. He came into contact with those artists, living with them and becoming a camajan as he entered their world - meaning a foreigner well-connected and respected by the Cuban population in the local language - receiving much of his collection material directly from them.
The exhibition is laid out on the helicoid ramp within the Temple Hall, the core of the National Cinema Museum, and features a variety of unique materials within its genre: sketches, layouts and posters are flanked by vintage and modern video-documentaries.
The area under the large screen is occupied by an installation reconstructing the suggestiveness of a street in Havana in pure Art Deco style, with a house, a porch, a mural, Cuban music and speeches by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
The exhibition, which is organised in themed areas, retraces all the stages leading Cuban graphic design from the revolution to our day. Starting from 1959, the revolution year which marked the beginning of a completely innovative current and saw film posters as the main way of communicating cultural events, the exhibition spreads out showing the cultural ferment of those years, thanks to the most significant works by some of the key artists. The graphic trait found its implementation through screenprinting, which features the creation of a sketch (a single handmade item), then of a layout leading to the only envisaged size of 51x76 cm (also a single item), subsequently proceeding to the printing of copies, which involve the maximum use of one colour for each stage with this technique, with a day for drying out between one colour and the next. The uniqueness of these artworks is rendered even more valuable and outstanding by the fact that so many creative talents have never existed simultaneously within the history of graphic design in working conditions that were not easy and with very limited production resources.
The Bardellotto Collection is a collection which may be considered unique outside the Cuban borders, exceeding 1,200 filmic, political and social posters, as well as about 400 sketches made in Cuba since 1959. The value of this collection lies within the fact that certain works are unique pieces, while there are exceedingly few samples of further ones by established artists awarded at an international level, some of them figuring in major museums (the Moma in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, etc.) making them difficult to find. The abundance of this collection is amplified by the presence of numerous study-sketches, and operative layouts with their first production runs.
In order to encourage visits at the exhibition, Easy Access Information for the public is available, located in a special totem at the beginning of the showcase circuit: consultation cards (high-legibility panels in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, panels with Easyreading font for dyslexics in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish; Italian and English facilitated text; Braille text in Italian, a visual-tactile diagram of the exhibition and tactile-visual reproductions of some of the works on display), plus content which can be activated via QR code and NFC (audio-video to accompany the exhibition with LIS - Italian Sign Language interpreting, with subtitles and audio in Italian; Italian audio on the exhibition panels).
Educational activities are planned for the entire duration of the exhibition, to include in-depth meetings with teachers and laboratory-lectures at the museum.
The exhibition will be complemented by the Hecho en Cuba! Cinema in Cuban graphic design. Posters from the Bardellotto Collection catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, which includes texts by Alberto Barbera, Jorge R. Bermúdez, Alessandra Riccio, Luciano Del Sette, in addition to exhibition material.
The collaboration between the National Cinema Museum and the City of Turin Airport is ongoing, and offering a preview of 20 photographs in the arrivals hall, not only visible by passengers but also by all those waiting there for them. The museum presence at the airport is completed by interactive displays – both at the arrivals level and at the departure hall – by means of which it is possible to access some of the National Cinema Museum collections content and learn everything about its programme of opportunities.
The inauguration of the Hecho en Cuba exhibition, of which Air France is Official Carrier, is firing off the collaboration for 2016 between Air France KLM and the National Cinema Museum, an association that has now been lasting for seven years, and will be extended to major Museum events throughout this year.