Alterazioni Video is an artist collective founded in Milan in 2004 by Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu and Giacomo Porfiri. Its members live between New York, Berlin, Genova, Palermo and Faro.
The collective has taken part in the 52nd Venice Biennale, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Manifesta 7 and 12, the Quadriennale di Roma and Performa in New York, and has shown at institutions including MoMA PS1, Hamburger Bahnhof, MAXXI, Museo Madre, Van Abbemuseum and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
From the start, Alterazioni Video has used contemporary art as an amplifier for political and social questions that are hard to raise elsewhere. Its works are acts of myth-making: an exhibition, a film or a performance becomes a device for intervening in the world, often with irony and at times at the edge of legality. Behind the provocation lies fieldwork, closer to that of a reporter or an anthropologist, in unstable territories. The work moves freely between museums, cinemas, festivals, public space and the web, and has reached into architecture, fashion and academic research. For the collective, altering perception is a way of making reality visible.
Incompiuto is the clearest example. Over twenty years, Alterazioni Video has turned the unfinished public works scattered across Italy, long seen as eyesores and symbols of waste, into the most important Italian architectural style from the post-war period to today. The buildings have not changed; the way they are seen has. That shift in perception, now taken up by universities, architects and designers, is the work itself.
The same approach drives Turbo Film, the cinematic genre the collective invented. The films are made without a script, together with the people met along the way, mixing documentary, fiction, found footage and internet culture, somewhere between the spaghetti western and YouTube neorealism. Since the members live in different cities, the Turbo Films are also where they meet: each set becomes a temporary laboratory, the collective’s shared studio.