Yervant GIANIKIAN & Angela RICCI LUCCHI

Founded 1975 in Milan, Italy
Based in Milan, Italy

Born in Italy to Armenian parents, Gianikian studied architecture in Venice. Ricci Lucchi was born in Ravenna, Italy, and studied painting in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoschka. The pair based themselves in Milan in 1975 and began making films together. Since then, they have created movies using a technique that involves rummaging through archives and collecting found footage that they colorize and re-edit. Their work, which seems to weave afresh history and breathe poetry into it, giving life to the past, has mainly dealt with the wars and colonialism of the early 20th century.

One of their most important films, From the Pole to the Equator, is an example of filmmaking as visual archaeology in which footage shot around 1910 by the pioneering Italian documentary filmmaker Luca Comerio and footage he collected from others is used to show metaphorically the spirit of the times in which the expansion of the Western developed nations was carried out sometimes violently and in close connection with the railways, also one of the earliest motifs of cinema.