Dear Readers,

we return with this issue to the Venice Biennale to capture the visions of the cinematic experience that come to us from the world of art.

Although without any connection between them, Dean Sameshima and Miguel Ángel Rojas - active in decidedly different regions of the world - suggest to us, with their photographic works, an interpretation of the role that adult-only movie theaters played before the advent of private forms of consumption of audiovisual productions.

This reflection invites us to present a quick overview of the trend of cinema-going in Colombia in recent years.

Once again we wish you an interesting reading,

Elisabetta Brunella
Secretary General of MEDIA Salles

CINEMATOGRAPHIC SUGGESTIONS AT THE VENICE ART BIENNALE
by Cristina Chinetti

Visiting the ground floor of the central pavilion of the 60th Venice Art Biennale, in the Giardini, you come across a small room whose white walls feature black and white photographic prints.

The series of nine highly contrasted photographs, arranged on two adjacent walls, immediately attracts attention: in the center of each of them a white space emerges, which when looked at closely turns out to be a cinema screen. The author Dean Sameshima (1971), an American who has long lived in Berlin, photographs from behind solitary spectators in his city's adult movie theatres. They are in no way identifiable, while staring at screens deprived of any pornographic image.

The compact brightness of the empty screens highlights the silhouette of these anonymous and lonely figures, intent on "watching" completely absent images of pleasure. It seems that Sameshima wanted to remind us that these adult cinemas offered, and still offer in the cases in which they survive here and there, the type of encounter that has been described as an "anonymous being-together”. In fact these spaces of leisure and pleasure can make visitors feel alone and together at the same time, as well as anonymous: "Being alone", precisely, as the title of the photographic series states.

The original and significant setting of the research of Sameshima, an artist linked to the queer world, is reflected on the opposite wall with another photographic series by the Colombian Miguel Ángel Rojas (1946), whose work since the 1960s has addressed, among other things, issues related to homosexuality and the male body.

The black and white prints exhibited here belong to the series “El Emperador” (1973-1980), which is inspired in its name by a cinema in Bogotá that in the 1970s was used as a meeting point for illegal sexual encounters between men. The photographs frame only parts of blurred, anonymized male bodies, which the clever play of light and shadow places at the center of the ambivalent relationship between secrecy and exhibition, implicit in the particular setting.

In the photographs of “El Negro” (1979) the blurred images appear even more significantly in a circle, because they were taken from a hole in the door of a bathroom, that of another red-light cinema in the Colombian capital, the Teatro Mogador (then transformed into a disco), where intimate encounters took place. Here the subject that we spectators, reduced almost to the role of voyeurs, observe is, as the title says, of African origin, as if Rojas wanted to highlight that the clients of these cinemas belonged to the most diverse origins and social spheres.

And in fact this galaxy, now almost disappeared, of adult-only porn cinemas - places in the past of murky encounters and unspeakable fantasies, which allowed an anonymous and solitary sharing of sexual pleasure through images on the big screen - hosted people with various and problematic human experiences and stories. Today these people have locked themselves in a solitude perhaps even more distressing due to the more technological, private and home-based fruition of pornographic productions.