The Cavallino Gallery and Croatian Artists Experimentation and Exchange in 1976

This essay aims to reconstruct the series of events organized by the Cavallino Gallery in 1976, which saw the collaboration between Paolo Cardazzo - the venetian owner, along with her sister Gabriella, of the gallery – and Sanja Iveković, Dalibor Martinis and Goran Trbuljak, artists of the New Art Practice; the essay will specifically focus on the events organized at the Galerije Suvremene Umjetnosti in Zagreb, at the Bologna Art Fair and at the Motovun meeting of 1976 and will focus particularly on the video-art-works produced by (or in collaboration with) the Gallery; The study will be focused almost exclusively to the analysis of direct sources. The choice of this method was influenced by the need of a historiographic review of studies regarding art after 1960; what is lacking is a historiography that, expanding as much as possible the references, focuses on the art-works and aims to understand artist’s real thinking, passions and culture. A deeper analysis of the sources is needed particularly when speaking about what could be called generically conceptual art: in this case art-works are not tied to a single constitutive means but are constituted by a complex device that incorporates the different aesthetic and technological tools of the means. The first step, thou, is to find all the concrete and ephemeral components of the art-work which means collecting all the documentary sources. Moreover, when art-works are composed (partly or completely) by analogue video as will be the case of many of the works in this essay, a digital migration carried up with scientific protocols is first needed in order to make the videos accessible again; only after this two passages it is then possible to reconstruct the art-work and the context in which it has been realized.