OFF SEASON: A Short Film About Ceramics and the Halcyon Days of Summer

To showcase some of her recent work, ceramic artist Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi teamed up with videographer and director Massimiliano Bomba to create Pomerrigio, a short filmed earlier this year in Milan. For PIN–UP they explained their idea for the film:

“The title of the film, Pomeriggio, in Italian means, simply, ‘afternoon.’ It evokes the warmth of a hazy mid-summer day spent wandering the city with equal measures of laziness and curiosity as the streets lay in temporary calm. The tailor shop is a place you could easily stumble upon on an carefree Situationist walk. It evokes both the present and the past, a place that might soon be replaced by a trendy bar, or a shop where you might buy a new SIM card — but luckily for you, it is still there. It’s a place so frozen in time as to almost feel like a memory even as you’re standing in it. Still, the tailor shop is also a place of action: of cutting and stitching, of touching, feeling, fetishizing wool and leather, cotton and silk. The clothes and their styles may have changed, but for now everything continues just as it always has: a button needs to be stitched back on, a pant leg needs to be hemmed, a seam needs to be let out. Within this halcyon scene the vases have their own insouciance. Placed without preciousness among the shop, they are moved, arranged, showed, and gazed upon just like every other object in the world. But, no matter how still or quiet inside, outside the windows, life carries on.”

Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi and Massimiliano Bomba
Milan, December 2018

Directed by Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi and Massimiliano Bomba.

Special thank you to Enrico Pompili and Caterina Pomante, and Camiceria Rigamonti