LUSSEMBURGO
Antoine Prum
Commissario: Ministry of Culture, Higher Education and Research, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg
Curatore: Boris Patrick Kremer.
Sede: Ca' del Duca, corte del Duca Sforza, San Marco 3052

For Luxembourg’s participation in the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale, artist and filmmaker Antoine Prum wrote and directed a medium length film (32’00’’) shot in High Definition (HD) technology and transferred to 35mm film.

Along with the traditional pavilion at Ca’ del Duca, the film will be screened on a regular basis at the Giorgione Cinema Movie d’essai, run by the Cinematography Department of the Commune of Venice.

It premieres at the Giorgione Cinema Movie d’essai on Friday, 10 June 2005, from 18h00 onwards, in a succession of screenings.

Mondo Veneziano. High Noon in the Sinking City addresses a wide variety of theoretical discourses currently on the contemporary art agenda, confronting them with a series of unexpected and spectacular events. Cast in an abandoned Venice, Mondo Veneziano narrates a meeting of four protagonists, representative of key players in the art world, who appear to conduct a complex theoretical debate. But their soliloquious confrontation — an insidious patchwork of quotations from recent specialist literature, paraphrasing the widely used “post-modern” technique of sampling — is interrupted by a string of bloody killings, largely inspired by common cinema genres such as gore or splatter movies.


The Venice that serves as a backdrop to the characters’ intellectual and physical joust is in reality a large-scale film set located in a southern town in Luxembourg, which has served in numerous feature films. Mondo Veneziano does not attempt to conceal the backlot; rather, the city itself becomes something of a quotation, much like the protagonists, who are depicted as actors rehearsing their comic-style figures for a final showdown. Alternating sinuous discursive phases with resolute physical action, Mondo Veneziano is a part serious, part caustic comment on a professional milieu.

The film was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Higher Education and Research, Luxembourg.
Technical co-producers: Télésparks S.A., Luxembourg & PTD Studio, Luxembourg.

A publication, supported by the Fonds Culturel National, Luxembourg, is available from Revolver · Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (ISBN 3-86588-120-3).