10.54103/ai/19850
Lazy Sunday is the third work in THE ITALIAN JOB series. Started in 2014, straddling the distance between Italy and the United States, this series intends to highlight the hidden structures behind themes such as artistic legitimacy, virtuality, immaterial labour and 2.0 relationships between artists and curators. Lazy Sunday takes shape after an invitation to participate in a virtual residency within the spaces of the 12th Atelier of Casa degli Artisti in Milan. The artist accepts the invitation, overturning the assumptions of the residency: instead of participating at a distance, Vavarella transforms his point of view into an open space for the virtual participation of other people. The work consists of a 12-hour film made with a 360° camera and shot continuously on August 8 2021, on an ordinary day. Starting at 9:40 a.m., Emilio Vavarella filmed the events of one of his summer Sundays, recording his every activity, from waking up until the evening. The film has been shown in the space set up in the Casa degli Artisti, where visitors took on the point of view of the artist using a Virtual Reality headset.
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Sofia Pirandello
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AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
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THE ITALIAN JOB - Job N. 3, Lazy Sunday (2022)
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2023-12-29
2023-02-19
2023-12-29
2024-02-23
AN-ICON
Sofia Pirandello
2023/12/29
10.54103/ai/19850
University of Milan
2785-7433
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new media
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THE ITALIAN JOB - Job N. 3, Lazy Sunday (2022)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19850/20017
2
          THE ITALIAN JOB
          - Job N. 3, Lazy
Sunday (2022)
by Emilio Vavarella in conversation
with Sofia Pirandello VR
                     Performance
                     POV
                     Portrait
                     360-degrees




                    Issue №2            Year 2023
                    → Immersions and Dives:
                    From the Environment
                    to Virtual Reality
                    Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                    Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
THE ITALIAN JOB - Job N. 3,
Lazy Sunday (2022)
EMILIO VAVARELLA, artist, Harvard University, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5550-8093
in conversation with SOFIA PIRANDELLO, Università degli Studi di Milano, https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4477-9199
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19850


                                 Lazy Sunday is the third work in THE ITALIAN
                  JOB series. Started in 2014, straddling the distance be-
                  tween Italy and the United States, this series intends to
                  highlight the hidden structures behind themes such as
                  artistic legitimacy, virtuality, immaterial labour and 2.0 rela-
                  tionships between artists and curators. Lazy Sunday takes
                  shape after an invitation to participate in a virtual residency
                  within the spaces of the 12th Atelier of Casa degli Artisti
                  in Milan. The artist accepts the invitation, overturning the
                  assumptions of the residency: instead of participating at
                  a distance, Vavarella transforms his point of view into an
                  open space for the virtual participation of other people.
                  The work consists of a 12-hour film made with a 360°
                  camera and shot continuously on August 8 2021, on an
                  ordinary day. Starting at 9:40 a.m., Emilio Vavarella filmed
                  the events of one of his summer Sundays, recording his
                  every activity, from waking up until the evening. The film
                  has been shown in the space set up in the Casa degli Ar-
                  tisti, where visitors took on the point of view of the artist
                  using a Virtual Reality headset.




Keywords          VR          Performance                  POV         Portrait           360-degrees
To quote this essay: E. Vavarella in conversation with S. Pirandello, “THE ITALIAN JOB - Job N. 3, Lazy
Sunday (2022),” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 2 (2023): 166-172,
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19850.
EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                                     166                                            AN-ICON
SOFIA PIRANDELLO: Lazy Sunday was produced in response to
a call for you to make a VR work during a remote residen-
cy; the idea was to create a workspace, an online artist’s
studio. With your work, you decided to overturn these
premises: you transported us between Cambridge and
Boston, opening a window on your everyday life, chang-
ing the cards on the table a bit as regards the roles of the
people involved. I am thinking above all of us curators and
the public. What kind of experience does this result in for
the parties involved, in your opinion?

      EMILIO VAVARELLA: Actually, on an empirical level, you would
be better equipped to answer the question, because it was
in a way your role, along with Elisabetta’s, that was partially
turned on its head. And those who enjoyed the work could,
or should, answer the question. Because I, after all, could
not share their point of view either...From my perspective,
it was about working simultaneously on several fronts. On
the theoretical front, I was interested in exploring the idea,
or ideology, of immersion, precisely because it represented
the starting point of your research project, and offered so
much food for thought.
      From a conceptual point of view, I was interested in
creating a work that seemed very straightforward and direct,
like the other works in this series, but capable of opening
up multiple discourses and various types of analysis and
interpretation.
      From the point of view of the material production of the
work, I needed to give concrete material form to my ideas
by bringing the dimension of techne as close as possible to
that of logos, and I needed, as requested in your invitation,
to use Virtual Reality.
      And finally, from an interpersonal point of view, it was
important to me that no matter how much my operation
was cloaked in a certain irony, unscrupulousness, and even
a certain amount of irreverence, it was still clear that it was
not a boutade, but an operation driven by a deep desire
to get to the bottom of all of these issues.

EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                      167                            AN-ICON
    And precisely because each of my works stems from
a synthesis between concept and material, the synthesis
came very naturally and spontaneously, almost as if it were
something absolutely necessary.

SOFIA PIRANDELLO: Lazy Sunday was conceived as the third
chapter of a series, THE ITALIAN JOB, dedicated to the
relationship between artists and curators in the realisation
of online works. What are the two works that precede Lazy
Sunday and what are they about?

      EMILIO VAVARELLA: First of all, all the works in THE ITALIAN
JOB series share a number of characteristics related to
the mode of production, the geographical context of the
works, and the issues addressed.
      The conditions of production reflect general socio-tech-
nical changes: production through (technical and social)
networks; production at zero cost to the artist; production
in the absence of a traditional artist’s studio; and alternative
forms of monetisation of artistic practice.
      With regard to geography, the artist’s position strad-
dling two countries, Italy and the United States, should
be emphasised. But also a position straddling online and
offline and at the intersection of material production and
intellectual work.
      The issues addressed, all interconnected, are origi-
nality, technical reproducibility, the relationship between
original and copy, artistic legitimisation and the value of
the work of art.
      The first work in the series was in 2014. I had been
selected for a digital artist residency on the theme of cloud
computing entitled embarrassment party, created and di-
rected by Marii Nyröp. My project consisted of stealing the
entire residency plus the eleven works created by seven
other international artists. The work, or operation, was sup-
ported by curatorial texts by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and
Marii Nyröp.


EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                     168                             AN-ICON
     The second work is entitled An-Archiving Game, and
is from the following year. I created a virtual exhibition in
the form of an animated GIF using photographs from the
FBI’s archive of stolen artworks, the “National Stolen Art
File.” I then offered physical copies of the stolen photos for
sale using an experimental open source platform that offers
a decentralised, peer-to-peer, tax-free, censorship-free
online network through which to trade in Bitcoins. This
second project was accompanied by curatorial texts by
Monica Bosaro and Emma Stanisic.

SOFIA PIRANDELLO: Immersive experiences, artistic or otherwise,
often aim to involve those who participate in them thanks
to a strong interactive dimension. You made a twelve-hour
film in which, as you yourself pointed out, the highlights are
those in which you read a book, eat an ice cream, take a
motorbike ride, and chat on the terrace on a lazy summer
Sunday. It is often said that VR is capable of recreating the
world we live in, and you have decided to do this in a way
that the viewer might not expect: you have provided twelve
hours of your life and the chance to be present. Elisabetta
wrote in this regard that there is no climax, all the moments
are equally important and interesting. What prompted you
to create a 360° film with these characteristics?

     EMILIO VAVARELLA: I believe that spending an entire day in
someone else’s shoes is as interesting as it is impractical,
for innumerable reasons. The duration of the work then
has as much to do with how I recorded my point of view
as with how I imagined it would be enjoyed, i.e. a one-off
projection, from morning to night, performative and un-
repeatable. A kind of live performance filmed for deferred
broadcast. With the hours of the night, the darkness, the
immobility of the body, the negation of the image, marking
its beginning and its end. If I had made cuts and editing,
arbitrarily, the meaning of the work would have inexora-
bly slipped through those same cuts. Editing would have
produced a semantic structure that would have interfered

EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                    169                           AN-ICON
with the very idea of “live action.” Only the annihilation of
the montage, or at least its reduction to a minimal, almost
non-existent form, makes it possible to focus on the con-
tent of the frame, which in turn is 360°, thus itself free of
the cuts made by the image frame.
     The 360° element, I believe, serves even more to ne-
gate the idea of immersiveness it promises. Because, while
it provides an immersive image, there is in a sense a dis-
comfort in immersion that becomes glaringly obvious when
one finds oneself cramped and constricted within an image
that is as impenetrable as it is immersive.

SOFIA PIRANDELLO: At first, Lazy Sunday may seem an extreme-
ly sincere work: you lay bare your everyday life without veils,
you share everything and everyone with us. When we enter
the film, we put ourselves in your shoes. Yet, one thing we
soon realise is that even if we spend hours immersed in
your environment, we will never have the experience you
have had. Both as an artist and as a researcher, what is
your stance on the rhetoric of presentiality and immedia-
cy of immersive media such as 360° cinema and Virtual
Reality? Are we ever really present in such a context and
in what way?

      EMILIO VAVARELLA: The work offers exactly what it promis-
es: it provides the artist’s point of view. On the other hand,
this type of residency is mainly aimed at this, and every
artist has in a way a duty to please the patrons they decide
to work with.
      The interesting thing, for me, is that the ideology im-
plicit in the discourses related to immersivity cloaks this
work with a desire for sharing and identification which is
not currently possible, and perhaps never will be, but which
arises almost automatically in the spectators / viewers.
      The work promises the audience the possibility of expe-
riencing a recording in Virtual Reality, but it is the expectation
linked to this type of fruition that immediately cloaks the work


EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                     170                             AN-ICON
with a desire, partially conscious and partially unconscious,
for immersion and identification with other bodies.
     Then there remains the question of access to the artist,
to his body as much as to his mind. I believe that there
has long been a deep fascination with artworks also as a
means of immersion in the minds of artists: it is perhaps a
history of art in reverse that has yet to be written. But this
is undoubtedly there.
     I like Elisabetta’s interpretation of the work, speaking
of a “faceless self-portrait,” linked in various ways to other
works of mine. I am thinking of The Sicilian Family, which
merges my family memories with images of my relatives, but
blends everything into impenetrable glitches; I am thinking
of my genetic portrait at the MAMbo Museum in Bologna,
of the series The Other Shapes of Me, in which I exist as
a digital clone in textile format, but still impenetrable, un-
readable. In Mnemograph I trace my childhood memories
but without letting anyone else have access to them.
     In a way then, all these works are a form of negoti-
ating, in an era dominated by visibility, the need to make
oneself visible, readable, recognisable, and accessible. I
think it is more interesting to deny all this regime of ab-
solute visibility, and thus always remain partially invisible,
inaccessible, or unrecognisable.

SOFIA PIRANDELLO: Lazy Sunday is a film, but it is also a per-
formance, in a more or less broad sense: a performance
which you carried out by filming subjectively for twelve
hours straight last summer and which was only available
for twelve hours on January 23 this year, at the Casa degli
Artisti in Milan; it is for those who wear helmets, ideally for
twelve hours, and who have to physically bear the burden
that reliving even just an ordinary day entails. Does this
have anything to do with betraying the promises of enter-
tainment often linked to VR in order to rethink the use of
this medium in an alternative way?



EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                    171                           AN-ICON
      EMILIO VAVARELLA: This has to do with my desire, traceable
in all my works regardless of the medium used, to create a
space for reflection. We could call it a critical space within
which to exercise one’s thoughts. The long, even boring
times of an anti-spectacular and prolonged fruition can
bring about this critical space.
      But it also has to do with a certain way of seeing reality,
which for me is a constant performance, or metamorphosis,
of events, of flows, to which we give order and which we try
to break up and segment according to our own arbitrary logic
and our own forms of experience. By offering to the public
a kind of mirrored experience of a day in my life I necessarily
gave form to my own idea of what reality looks like.




EMILIO VAVARELLA AND
SOFIA PIRANDELLO                     172                            AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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