Yuri Ancarani, born in 1972 in Ravenna, is an Italian video artist. His works, which combine elements of documentary cinema and contemporary art, aim to explore aspects that go unnoticed in everyday life. His way of focusing and using the camera with meticulous precision creates his distinct aesthetics, marked by the sculptural depth of the shots and of video works that investigate the hidden elements of daily life and of social codes. His works have been presented in numerous exhibitions and museums in Italy and abroad, including the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), MAXXI (Rome), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and the Guggenheim Museum (New York). In 2016 his feature film The Challenge won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Festival.
Lapidi (2018) and Whipping Zombie (2017)
Video installation
The artist’s work is composed of Whipping Zombie and Lapidi, two videos that aim to explore the contemporary metamorphoses of the practices of memory, in relations to the traumas and bloody wounds of collective history. Whipping Zombie reflects on the ritual linked to the Caribbean cults of trance and possession, in which the inhabitants of a remote village in Haiti perform the gestures and the dynamics of their terrifying past as slaves. In Lapidi, the artist films the memorial tablets that honour the memory of the magistrates, civilians, journalists, police officers and all those to whom a monument has been devoted for having been victims of violence in Palermo. The video is a sequence of silent shots, in which the memorial tablets become video sculptures.