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05 February1969
Inflatable Sculptures
Author
Famiglia Ranza
Format
Super8
Duration
01'29''
Credits
Music by Guglielmo Pagnozzi

In this film shot in early February 1969 in the courtyard of the Ranza house in Varese, artist Franco Mazzucchelli creates one of his famous inflatable sculptures. "These pneumatic PVC works represent the greatest upsetting of spacious conceptions as much as sculptural conceptions in general." This is how Mazzucchelli's inflatable sculptures are presented at the Diagramma gallery in Milan in the late 1960s. A subversion of form. But the artist goes far beyond this subversion with the decision to take his works out of traditional art venues, into public space - into the outskirts of cities, into parks, onto beaches - and literally to abandon them to themselves. The idea, in contrast to the commodification of art, is that the inflatable sculpture lives on by interacting with the environment and the human being, and only for the indefinite time of its physical durability. This is how the 'art to be abandoned' was born, which provokes different behaviours, from vandalism on the inflatable sculptures to children playing with them and struggling workers using them to improvise barricades. In Ranza's Super8, the sculpture is in the backyard and we do not yet know what its fate will be.

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