Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

  • Home
  • The Magazine
    • About
    • Contributors
    • Categories >
      • Art
      • Artist
      • Books
      • Thought
      • Film
      • Cinema Disordinaire
      • Riot Sounds
      • Records
      • Jazz
      • Interview
      • Inside The Image
      • More   >
        • Architecture
        • Image
        • The Line
        • The New Word
        • That Evening Sun
        • Twenty Que
        • The Natural World
        • Opera
        • Video
        • Fiction
        • From The Shelf
        • FR/BLCK/PR
    • Contact
    • Masthead
  • Art
    • Art Reviews
  • Books
    • Book Reviews
  • film
    • Film Reviews
  • Records
    • Jazz Reviews
    • All Reviews
  • Riot Sounds
  • Cinema Disordinaire
    • Riot Cinema

Forcella Reigns: The Men Who Play Cards

September 7, 2018 By Hoyt Hilsman Leave a Comment

at ZJU Theater, North Hollywood (through 9 September)
Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman

Neapolitian painter and set designer Francesca Bifulco and her collaborator, musician and sound designer Alex Schetter, have recreated a virtual Naples streetscape that focuses on the timeless ritual of men playing cards. The title of the installation, Forcella Reigns, refers to the rundown neighborhood in Naples that is overrun with violence and organized crime. Yet amidst the poverty and chaos of the Forcella neighborhood, Bifulco has observed patterns of life that are universal in their richness.

Bifulco, a native of Naples, observed the men playing cards on her many visits to the neighborhood and studied the daily rhythms not only of the card playing, but also of the conversation,  espresso drinking and gossiping in this exclusively male preserve. Although the men were always suspicious of outsiders, Bifulco gained their trust, and documented them in video and audio form as they played the traditional game of “scopa,” which is roughly translated as “broom” or “sweep.”

Francesc Bifulco

Francesca Bifulco with the men of Forcella

Adopting an anthropological perspective on the ritual, Bifulco came to regard the scopa game as a kind of open-air theater, and the players as actors in the drama. She viewed the daily game as not so much a routine, but rather a ritual that had likely been enacted over centuries and was as much a part of the neighborhood as the crumbling buildings. In fact, she adopts the symbols that appear on the scopa cards – dating from at least the Middle Ages – as one of the visual themes of the installation.

Francesc Bifulco

“Forcella Steps”

The multi-media installation, set in a black-box theater in North Hollywood, features a reconstructed silhouette of the staircase in Naples where the ritual of the game is played out on a daily basis. Using video projections, Bifulco depicts the actions of the players, accompanied by an enhanced video score of voices and street sounds. The effect is a moving, often haunting tableau of the streetscape that is abstracted to a more universal dimension.

Francesc Bifulco
Francesc Bifulco

Bifulco at work

The piece also features a series of paintings on wood, which carry out the themes of card-playing. Bifulco adheres strictly to red and black tones in the entire installation, including a black card table with illuminated red objects, as well as a charcoal black foot warmer outlined in red. The red and black theme suggests the medieval conflict between the black of the clergy and the red of the nobility, a conflict that persists today in the social struggle between the forces of good and evil, dark and light. This conflict seems especially highlighted on the rough streets of contemporary Naples.

The artist’s background in scenic design is particularly notable here, since she has in effect re-created and abstracted the “set” of a Naples street. Echoes of Italian cinema are apparent, from Rossellini’s Rome Open City to Fellini’s La Strada. Bifulco draws on the European tradition of cinema verite to communicate the imagined reality of a gritty street scene.

Francesc Bifulco

Bifulco’s goal in the piece is to involve the artist – and the viewer – in a scene where she is an outsider. It is clearly an attempt by the artist as observer to become a participant in a ritual from which she is excluded, but yet longs to understand. As a stranger in the neighborhood, an artist and a woman observing the male-only ritual, Bifulco embraces her role but also is exploring the effect of the observer on the participants. In that sense, this is an artistic version of the Heisenberg principle that observation itself can impact a phenomenon.

The complexity of Bifulco’s vision here is fairly obscure at first blush. It takes a pretty lengthy discourse from the artist for her vision to be fully communicated to the casual viewer. However, once it becomes clear what Bifulco is after here – a sense of timeless place and ritual – the richness of the installation is apparent and ultimately satisfying.

Francesc Bifulco
The Men Who Play Cards
Francesc Bifulco
The Forcella Reigns set, with Bifulco in quiet attendance.

Francesc Bifulco

Hoyt Hilsman is a critic, writer and journalist. He has been a regular theater and cultural critic for Daily Variety and HuffPost, and has written articles for national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and others. He is a member and former President of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and served as Chair of the PEN West Drama Awards. As a writer, his stage plays and musicals have been produced in theaters around the country and abroad, and he has written screenplays for a number of studios and television networks, including Disney, Sony, New Line, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS. He has also written a series of political thrillers novels, including Nineteen Angels, which is currently in development as a feature film. 

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

The New Word

New Poems from John Biscello

Excerpted from Moonglow on Mercy Street
forthcoming on CSF Publishing

Birthing Pains

To see, everywhere,
brave little lights going up,
flares of hope and justice,
holding hands
to tip the scales
in a bond of solidarity,
a fire-chastened purge
and desire for change’s
holy golden grail,
the quest,
a blessed rhyme
and legacy,
with each and every
one of our hearts
breaking open
to scale the ribs of light
and become radical midwives
to a collective rebirth.

[Read More…]

The Line

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20 If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad

by Sarah A. Seo Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 The New York Review of Books In 1963, after Sam Cooke was […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99 New York Review of Books Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald […]

Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Reviewed by John Biscello The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99 Harvard Review In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita Translated by Eknath Easwaran Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00 Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor Brown: Poems by Kevin Young Knopf, 176pp., $19.29 Harvard Review In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Reviewed by Flora Field Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich Persea, 80pp., $12.69 Columbia Journal In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap “My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933 He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below […]

Cornel West and his 2001 Preface to Race Matters: "Democracy Matters in Race Matters." At Riot Material.

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters Race Matters by Cornel West Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60 Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence […]

Another Week in the Death of America

Samantha Fields, American Dreaming at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles Reviewed by Eve Wood The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a […]

Through the Lens of Race, and Jim Crow South, in Eudora Welty's photographs

Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019) at Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London by Zadie Smith Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission edited by Clara Kim Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95 New York Review of Books Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is […]

Romare Bearden's Pittsburgh Memory, 1964. Two books on Romare Bearden, "An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden" and "The Romare Bearden Reader" are reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $34.95 . The Romare Bearden Reader edited by Robert G. O’Meally Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper) New York Review of Books Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a […]

Donald Trump and the Corporate Fascist Takeover

Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics

by Johanna Drucker Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a  trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated […]

Wim Wenders Until The End Of The World Directors Cut. An in-depth review is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Unbound Promise Of The Full Five-Hour Masterwork Until The End Of The World

by Henry Cherry Until the End of the World is a film, like the best of them, that stands outside of genre. Part sci-fi epoch, part love story, part road movie, it begins and ends with an image of the Earth’s curvature. Made by director Wim Wenders, it is the culmination of his most successful […]

Shabaka and the Ancestors, We Are Sent Here by History, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History

on Impulse! Records Reviewed by Henry Cherry Shabaka Hutchings, the London based musician behind The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet, had just  released a second recording with his South African based project, Shabaka & the Ancestors when Covid-19 canceled the promotional tour along with everything else in the world. Hutchings spoke with NPR […]

RIOT MATERIAL
art. word. thought.