Tag: Mauro Caruso

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6huQtY0tI

We just got a mail from Sicily and, as always, it contained some good news. Mauro Caruso & Patrick Frunzio discovered the “Grand Hotel Lido” and brought Martino Cattaneo, Aref Koushesh and Jacopo Carozzi along on the abandoned terrain. What a crazy spot! Read more about it:

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I guess it could sound strange and weird to compare California and Siciliy ways of life…

But, for a good long period, these two areas, as far enough as similar to each other, had something in common.

It’s a particular type of architecture, that first in America, then all along Sicilian coasts, had an important development right after World War 2.

We are talking about the raising of seaside resorts, “villages for the beaches”, those places born to satisfy the desire of that middle-class average human being to escape from the everyday boring jobs and life, to sprint themselves straight into this limbo of channeled fun.

This new business got in the mindset of lots of Sicilian contractor’s, and soon enough Sicily was full of these new type of villages.

Our attention fell into one of these places, full Azzurro-sky color, thanks to some pics found on the web of some kids going around inside this kind of swimming pool, incredible, not typical for this island at all.

Useless to say it, here it’s where the Club checked-in once again: call the crew, a mission to check if that was real or not, a few chats with the neighborhoods to check if it was all good, and a few friends from north Italy ready to smash it with us.

Unfortunately that’s the other side of the medallion…people here are really calm and friendly, but any situation can turn the complete opposite any second for any reasons, especially when, after some research, you find out the long claws of the Black Hand had found its way to land on that structure as well, till the place got totally shut down many years ago; we really just wanted to skate and not ended up face to face with some Scarface kids.

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The hardest thing was to find a cheap vehicle to go around, but luckily, we managed to borrow our friend Gionni’s car for free…the fact that it didn’t have all the documents to be driven around and that it would only start by pushing it, that’s another story, and you know you always need that pepper in life to get the right taste.

Skating that place was both cool and a bit sad: first of all, it doesn’t happen every day to be able to find and skate something like that in Sicily, but at the same time it’s sad to see a structure with that potential, culturally and architecturally, ended up like that.

An eco of 90’s piano-bar music goes around the air and send us straight to those days when people were still believed to have a different future than the one built on a sand castle.

In our opinion, there is four type of skaters, the alcohol-free one,  the beer kind, the cocktail sort and the wine connoisseur.

To put this into perspective Denis Lynn is the beer kind whereas Sylvain Tognelli seems to the type to order a long drink at the bar, while this crew now obviously falls into the last category.

Travelling all the way to Italy to see the process of wine making and taste the juice almost directly from the land.

Davide Biondani summed up the trip the best “Not bad skating after 8 or 9 glasses of red wine in the morning”

When the skater comes with his own concept you already know that there is a great commitment to the project. Mauro Caruso brought over the years more than a couple of photographers and videographers to the Sicilian ghost-town and with the help of Ludovic Azémar and Carhartt WIP the result is here to watch. Featuring : Mauro Caruso, Felipe Bartolomé, Joseph Biais

“In 1968 Gibellina, a small town nestled in the Belice valley of western Sicily, was destroyed by an earthquake. Today, it remains silent. Some 11 kilometres from where this town once stood, you will find its replacement, Gibellina Nuova. Designed by some of Italy’s most prominent artists and architects of the time, it is a town unlike any other in the region, resembling more of an open-air museum than a place where people work and live. But in many ways, it is representative of the region itself, a place that prides itself on being different and where people consider themselves Sicilian first, Italian second.

It is here that provides the setting for Azzurro, a film featuring Sicilian-born Carhartt WIP skater Mauro Caruso. The project was first initiated by Mauro in 2010 only to then suffer a series of setbacks that he came to refer to as “the curse of Gibellina.” It was finally completed in March of this year. Shot by Ludo Azémar in a style that evokes the aesthetic of neorealism, Italy’s golden era of cinema, Azzurro effortlessly blends skateboarding, architecture and art.”

James Cruickshank is definitely one of the most talented filmmakers in our skateboarding community. This piece was filmed just a few weeks ago and features a small selected part from the European Converse Cons team and introduces a household name: Mauro Caruso.

A video by James Cruickshank for a brief glance skateboardmag, in association with Converse Cons.

Filmed on location in the region of Puglia, Italy and starring: Felipe Bartolomé, Remy Taveira, Pietro Bontà, Ollie Lock, Jonas Hess, Jerome Campbell and Mauro Caruso.

Film and edit by James Cruickshank.

Francisco Saco is so god damn passionated about what he is doing that you might get caught on fire if you work with him. He has the power to motivate you in a heartbeat – from sitting in a corner to grinding something. He will talk untill you really move your ass. We sat down with him to chat about Homo Pop Gun on the very day it will be celebrate its premiere. Happy Skateboarding y’all!

What is your new Movie “Homo Pop Gun” like? What do you wanna show your audience?
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines romantic comedy as “a general term for comedies that deal mainly with the follies and misunderstandings of young lovers, in a light-hearted and happily concluded manner whichusually avoids serious satire”. We can attempt to date the romantic comedy back to the ancient Greeks, who
incorporated elements of sexual and social nature in their comedies, or back to Shakespeare’s comedies of the late 1590s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream being purely romantic while Much Ado About Nothing approaches the comedy of manners.

It was not until the creation of romantic love in the western European medieval period, though, that “romance” came to refer to “romantic love” situations, rather than the heroic adventures of medieval Romance. The creation of huge economic social strata in the Gilded Age combined with the heightened openness about sex after the Victorian Era and the celebration of Sigmund Freud’s theories, and the birth of the film industry in the early twentieth century, gave way to the screwball comedy. As class consciousness declined and World War II unified various social orders, the savage screwball comedies of the twenties and thirties gave way to more harmless comedies. This style faded in the 1960s, and the genre lay mostly dormant until the more sexually charged ‘When Harry Met Sally’ had a successful box office run in 1989, paving the way for a rebirth for the Hollywood romantic comedy in the mid-1990s. And I would have to say that it is this late period of the romantic comedy that most informed me in the making of Homo Pop Gun. These are the films that I was surrounded by when growing up, forced to engage with either by girlfriends past or my mother and sister spending time back home. I make skate videos with themes to keep from getting bored and lost in the skating.

My last film was about post-colonialism and the vast divide between Latin American and European sensibilities. This time around my main focus was Love and my perception of it, or how I was being forced by elements around me to perceive it, how to perceive romance and companionship. I shot this video in exactly one year because of obsession, because of an addiction to realizing another project that just wouldn’t let go of me. After Video Diays, I thought I would take a break, but I just couldn’t force myself to. I’m proud of this video in the same way one is proud of something totally unexpected, a happy accident of sorts. I just kept shooting because I had no other alternative. And then somehow some idea formed in the distance and it made sense, total sense, to make this video about love and relationships and all that went with it.

Whats the main difference between “Video Diays” and “Homo Pop Gun”?
I honestly tried to make this more of a ‘skatevideo’ and I think at times I do go in that direction, but the ‘story’ aspect always manages to shine through. I guess that’s the main difference between this one and Video Diays. I wanted to try and get away from such experimentation and go for a straight skate video, but apparently I’m no good at those so the theme just slowly crept out of me and spilled into the video, along with all my eccentricities, which I’m very well aware are not everybody’s cup of tea. But I drink my own brand of tea and don’t really care if people catch on or not. I do feel the flow and level of skating is much higher in this one. And this time around its not as academic or critical. Homo Pop Gun works on a more purely emotional level. I really do hope people can identify with it in that way. I was also a little less strict about using only Hi8. I incorporated a lot of iPhone material, as well as ‘downgraded’ VX and HD footage, not to mention a little bit of Super8mm to class it up some.

Francisco Saco HPG2

Who came up with the name Homo Pop Gun?
I could spend a while bullshitting, saying that I’m trying to buck the trend in skating right now about bromances, gay culture, ambiguity and club culture by saying the title is a reference to all that, but in actuality it was just a happy accident when Martin Küpper, of MK1 fame, fucked up the name of a movie he was trying to remember, saying the film was called Homo Pop Gun. We all laughed and suggested he name his video that, but he went the safer, more sensible route and chose MK1. I on the other hand felt that title had just what I was looking for, for the themes being explored in my video, so I asked if I could take it and he said yes. I probably owe him a beer down the road at some point for that.

Francisco Saco HPG3

Who is involved in your latest project?
Some of the cast of my skate romcom are Hannes Schilling, Malte Spitz, Callum Paul, Dallas Rockvam, Roland Hirsh, Michael Mackrodt, Sergej Vutuc, Juan Esteban Saavedera, Kevin Besset, Valeri Rosomako, Remy Taveira, Flex O’Connor, Gereon Hecht, Elna Gurvitz, Julian Thyssen, Karsten Kleppan, Mauro Caruso, Steve Forstner and Konstantin Rutschmann.

The movie will be shown today at Villa Neukölln. For more information click HERE.

All Photos by: Malte Spitz.

Francisco Saco did it again. Ein fast 15 Minuten langer Trailer für sein neustes Werk Homo Pop Gun, welches am 10. Oktober in der Villa Neukölln, Berlin Premiere feiern wird. Mit dabei sind unter anderem: Konstantin Rutschmann, Eniz Fazilov, Dallas Rockvam, Steve Forstner, Daniel Pannemann, Malte Spitz und viele, viele mehr.

Zuerst mal die Fakten auf den Tisch: Modica ist eine kleine Stadt auf Sizilien, die ungefähr 1300 vor Christus gegründet wurde und heute zum Unesco Weltkulturerbe zählt. Die Stadt ist auch unter dem Namen Muòrica bekannt und ist Schauplatz dieses Kurzfilms, in dem Mauro Caruso sich seinen Weg durch die engen Gassen sucht und dabei alles mitnimmt, was halbwegs in die Kategorie “skateable” fällt.


Mauro Caruso by Sam Clark

In diesem Sommer schuf Aktionskünstler Roberto Cuellar die Skulptur “Palmera”. Bespielt wurde die leuchtende Skate-Palme von Mauro Caruso, Sami Harithi, Conrad Bauer und weiteren Locals, sowie internationalen Gästen. Jo Peters hat die Sessions mit der Videokamera eindrucksvoll festgehalten.

Francisco Saco mit seiner Interpretation der Absolut Graffiti Session an der Sic Semper Skulptur von Roberto Cuellar. Mit dabei sind Mauro Caruso, Kai Hillebrand, Hardy, Colin Mclean und Daniel Pannemann. Satisfaction kills desire.

Francisco Saco macht Ernst und kündigt sein Lo-Fi Streifen Video Diays für den nächsten Monat an. Wann und wo die Premiere gefeiert wird, könnt ihr natürlich bald hier erfahren. Mit dabei sind unter anderem: Roland Hirsch, Charles Collet, Mauro Caruso, Carsten Beneker, Olman Torres, Julian Dykmans, Alberto Vargas, Dallas Rockvam, Bryan Gutiérrez, Daniel Pannemann, Youri Fernandez und Sebi Dörfer.

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