LUCE ROSSA! LUCE ROSSA! – ELEONORA ROARO

In 1977, the owner of the Majestic Sexi Movie cinema, Luigi De Pedys, retrieved a red flashing light from a firehouse and installed it outside his venue, which he would soon convert into a porn cinema. He chose to advertise the programme not using posters, but only through an intermittent red light and a warning sign: “images not suitable for a sensitive audience”. The first film screened, “Suburban Wives” (Derek Ford, 1971; “I pornogiochi delle femmine svedesi” in Italian, “The Porn Games of the Swedish Females”), was followed by several titles by Ernst Hofbauer and “Deep Throat” (Gerard Damiano, 1972), inaugurating a period in which many cinemas in crisis converted to screening porn.

The Majestic Sexi Movie was the first red-light cinema in Milan and among the earliest in Italy, opening on 15 November 1977 and closing on 30 August 1992 due to competition from home video. The emergence of porn cinemas during the Years of Lead and the energy crisis of the 1970s anticipated a culture of hedonism that would have been established at the end of the decade, also to reorient the collective desire in a period of intense political and social tension marked by massacres, attacks, and kidnappings.
“LUCE ROSSA! LUCE ROSSA!” (”RED LIGHT! RED LIGHT!”) stems from a paradox: promoting porn cinema in the public space of the city – a form of communication intrinsically bound to the visual and voyeuristic dimension – without the image, only through a light element and language. In the window of Subplace, a public space in a site of transit in Milano, are presented a poster produced by the artist, which includes elements inspired by the original porn posters and recalls the centrality of language in 1970s conceptual art, and a vintage flashing red light. This sits alongside a video titled “LUCE ROSSA! LUCE ROSSA!” in which “Suburban Wives” – the first erotic film screened at the Majestic – is reduced to a textual dimension while preserving its original duration.
The artist isolated each sequence of the film and asked an AI to produce a description of the scene, specifying the type of shot, the actions, and the relations between bodies. At the core of the work lies the relationship between text and image, fundamental both to film theory and to the operation of contemporary generative models. The automated recognition performed by the AI is a reflection on the standardisation of the images on which it has been trained, a necessary condition for their legibility and description. At the same time, it evokes the history of cinema as a set of codified forms and shared schemas, now reconfigured as a vast dataset. In the act of seeing – where the male gaze embedded in its training data persists – the AI empties the erotic image of meaning, reducing it algorithmically to mere description.

Text by Rossella Moratto here: https://www.eleonoraroaro.com/luce-rossa-luce-rossa-subplace-milano/