Radical Ecologies and Experimental Videos in Bologna in the Early 1990s

Throughout this paper, I will focus on the emergence of video technology at the blooming of the postmodern era. More specifically, I would like to address the experimental use of analog video in the radical context of Bologna’s alternative scene during the early Nineties. Among these videos, we can find several experimental video projects – from Cane Capovolto, for instance –, which take part in a broader media context and a collective enunciation process (Deleuze and Guattari 1972). So, first of all, we would like to answer this question: how can experimental video projects be part of the development of a “collective audiovisual intelligence”, nourished at the merging point between body and technology? Taking these elements as starting points, we will then consider how the traces that media-activism and experimental video in Bologna left behind can help us to reconstruct that specific “media ecology” (Fuller 2005; Goddard 2018). These objects are strictly intertwined with the social movements from which they stemmed. More specifically I will address the interrelationships between activism and experimental video in Bologna, highlighting the aesthetic issues of the former and the political stances of the latter.