Tape Connection is a private company, founded in 1984 by five partners, to promote and distribute experimental video in Italy. TC's activities include: an archive of more than 200 Italian titles: more than 1200 showings in Italian cities: contacts with about fifty countries (including USSR, Pakistan, and Uruguay): the organisation of co-productions and the sale of more than 40 videos to TV networks. After a long debate, recently we took the decision to sell our archive, by the end of 1992, to a public institution. How to explain this? We did our best, during the rise of “Berlusconi’s empire" in Italy, to find a space for videoculture and to show something different from shining advertising/ boring TV images. Now that most of the formalism of video has been “eaten up” by private and public channels, which have, like monsters, digested the aesthetics while refusing the deeper contents of videoculture, we find our focus shifting from the desire to promote video as a new medium to the need of supporting the independence of productions that try to keep its distance from the standards of mass production. We have promoted the early works/ experiments by Studio Azzurro, Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Theo Eshetu and many others. To these close friends and supporters of ours we dedicate this programme, as a tribute to their creativity. Enjoy this dive into the 80 's of Italian videos and this glimpse of the 90 's. Between the past and future, our present wants to offer you an Italian Tape Connection.
Maia Giacobbe-Borelli