Using video, sculpture, and drawing, Luca Buvoli transforms ICA’s Ramp Space into a 3-D marquis for A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani). This title names both the project and the artist’s new video that makes its premiere as part of the multi-media installation. The words are those of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded Futurism, the avant-garde movement that brought Italy up to speed with modernism and into controversial relationship with Fascism during the early 20th century. The title looms large in letters cast from translucent resin and suspended within the lofty ramp space, where a human figure in flight zooms overhead. The words are also spoken by Marinetti’s daughter Vittoria, who Buvoli interviewed as part of the video, which present central themes of Buvoli’s recent work: velocity and flight.

The appeal of flight is as spectacular as the danger. Exploring aesthetic as well as political aspects of flight, Buvoli’s featured video is part of a three-channel work. One monitor is dedicated to the mostly animated video A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani), Part I; two monitors present How can this Thing be Explained? (Come Si Può Spiegare Questo Cosa?), Chapters I and II, which features interviews in Italian and English. Throughout the installation, documentary footage and passages of pure animation merge personal memory, historic accounts, and pictorial abstractions. The daughters of Marinetti, as well as scholars, address the problematic aspects that Futurism evokes in its celebration of violence. Music also plays a key role. Conceptually speaking, A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani) is the latest installment in the overall project Flying-Practical Training that Buvoli initiated in 1997.