Tribute to Giovanna Puggioni

Born into a modest family in Genoa in 1950, Giovanna Puggioni soon developed a passion for art. In 1972, she defended her thesis in Medieval Art History, while taking courses at the Genoa School of Fine Arts, where she practiced silkscreen printing.

In 1974, she met Christian Lebrat, and from then on divided her life between France and Italy. The following year, together they created TROIS PETITS TOURS ET PUIS S’EN VONT, under the arcades of the San Luca basilica sanctuary in Bologna. Until 2015, the year of her death, Giovanna Puggioni, while teaching Italian language and culture to the children of Italian immigrants in Paris, then art history in her native region, produced several works.

In 1976, his first solo film IN/CONTRO/LUCE, a long black-and-white panorama of the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, recreates the intrinsic qualities of light in a metamorphosis of the filmed subject

metamorphosis of the filmed subject. His subsequent films will deepen this conquest of luminous matter through a face-to-face encounter with camera and film: camera movements, colored filters, overprints, film perforations.

OLTREMARE, made in the summer of 1985 in the light of Filicoudi (Sicily), inaugurates his style of editing directly into the camera. Like DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE, shot in Camoglie (Liguria) with his students

in 1992, both films exalt the intensity of bodies and objects.

IRIS, shot in 1997 in the medieval village of Triora, is constructed like a labyrinth of images

of images.

In 1999, with QUATTRO STAGIONI, she superimposed on the same film the passage of time and seasons captured through the window of the apartment where she lived in Paris for almost twenty years.

ROYAL GALA (2005) brings together the testimonies of several friends and close associates of the Lettrist artist Maurice Lemaître, in an exercise of admiration for both the man and his work.

In 2006, with FUOCO, the first opus in an anthology of material interrupted by illness, she interweaves several fireworks punctuated by needle-punched holes in the film.

Her filmography concludes in 2010 with V4 (IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU), variations on a video sequence shot in the port of Genoa.