Morte dell'arcivescovo

MORTE DELL’ARCIVESCOVO is an experimental recreation of the opening scene of Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s unmade film on the assassination of Salvadorian Archbishop Oscar Romero. The work was originally created by Public Studio for their 2015 exhibition The Accelerators. After his influential film The Battle of Algiers (1966), Pontecorvo wanted to make a project exploring the United States’ criminally unjust political interventions in Central and South America. After years of being stonewalled by producers, he said he felt “impotent” and aside from a script draft, the film was never made. The film was intended to look at the injustices committed by the US in Latin America through the life of Archbishop Romero, an outspoken activist against US aggression who was assassinated at the hands of a CIA-trained Salvadorian death squad. Only a few scholars who had seen it in Pontecorvo’s archive knew of the script’s existence. Public Studio managed to locate the script and, following it closely, reconstructed the film’s opening sequence using appropriated footage, archival images, and CGI reconstructions to strictly replicate the script’s scenographic and musical directions.

Public Studio is the collective art practice of filmmaker Elle Flanders and architect Tamira Sawatzky. Public Studio creates large-scale public art works, lens-based works, films, and immersive installations. Grounded in the personal, social, and political implications of landscape, Public Studio’s multidisciplinary practice engages themes of political dissent, war and militarization, and ecology and urbanization, through the activation of site. Public Studio often works in collaboration with other artists.