The theme chosen this year is tied directly to that of the preceding edition, which focused on public art, not because it deals with work placed in a shared social space, but because it also aims to create an unbroken line of communication with the audience.

In fact, I think that the only common thread between participants in this year's series is their desire to create a dialectic rapport with the spectator, rather than to render the images they create symbolic, abstract or universal. The objective is therefore to begin an exchange of experiences, necessarily based on stories and testimony. This gathering of the desire to "tell stories" in the artistic field is manifested in many forms and is often connected to the abandonment of univocal or unique, synthetic or non-discursive images. Artistic production is transforming, moving towards more complexity in groups of work or thematic lines. Often we see, instead of a simple painting, a whole series of work, or instead of one photo, a sequence of photographic images; we're also seeing video and film. It seems, then, that this attention to narration is part of a process of contamination with other arts, a process that already has quite a long history but is now coming to maturation.

Many artists have therefore entered the expressive territory of cinema not just to escape the restrictive world of art - and maybe to confront big production budgets and big audiences - but above all in order to renew an interrupted line of communication. For this reason, Facts & Fiction is planned not only as a moment of encounter and debate, but also as a selection of video and films (curated by Andrea Lisson and Giovanna Amadasi) that enrich the conference's proceedings. This film series further testifies to the interest and problematic of the conference theme, and confirms - if there's still the need - the richness of a territory, hybridised between diverse disciplines, that is increasingly becoming the most natural way to escape from preconceived and academic schematics. Art certainly still has its own specific procedures as well as specific points of view, but this contamination and mixing with narration (as in theatre, cinema or animation) is an additive process and not a passive absorption of a way of working in a different discipline's tradition.

So even if this new, fresh approach by people who don't necessarily have a long background in the discipline occasionally borders on superficiality or repeats, many years later, experiments that have already happened, been absorbed and surpassed, I am convinced that many interesting and relevant artistic revolutions will begin precisely here.

From another angle, the episodes that could be cited to connect this narrative opening in art to its tradition are innumerable. We find this exigency in more or less every epoch and, within the Italian experience, all we need to think of are the storied Roman columns or grand victory arches, or else the frescoes and paintings that illustrate episodes of the Old and New Testaments. Art traditionally served as the only real "writing" or narration for the uneducated (aside, of course, from oral history, which is very important). But the distance between the "historical" and "contemporary" experience is enormous and to associate them could create profound misunderstandings. The situation is not so linear or free of contradictions. It's necessary to reformulate and re-articulate the concept of narration and story-telling within the field of art and to tie this reflection to a more general context. Above all we need to analyse the use of images by media and the great transformation that has consequently arisen - most importantly a profound co-penetration of the planes of reality and fiction.1 It's evident that in recent years even story-telling has undergone a crisis and transformation as a result.2 Our title for the conference and film series was chosen to reflect the real ambiguity of this situation which oscillates between facts and fiction, between lived experience, memory and the stories that pour forth. The interventions and reflections presented in this book run between these contrasting and almost always inseparable polarities. Naturally, each of the participants begins from his or her work and presents his or her own, unique vision of art.

We are living inside of this dialectic of facts and fiction, in an "age of information," where sources of knowledge arrive through increasingly diverse and sophisticated channels, yet where reality is increasingly constructed ad hoc by images (and "information") and fiction, not recognised as such, is substituted for "real life." Perhaps it's downright useless to insist on how much our reality is based on and constructed by fiction, how much even the most concrete of our lived experiences, our city and the public locales we frequent, regulate themselves to the televisual and cinematic imaginary.3 But the uniformity that this situation brings about is in a certain sense balanced by a greater and easier access to information and the possibility of constructing one's own story, without subjecting to pretences of the "objectivity" of museums and history books, or, even more ubiquitous, of news reports.

It's important to find a way and the patience to narrate facts that, in themselves, remain untouchable if not personalised through a story: abstract formulas, numbers indicating the unemployment rate, infant mortality, tax hikes or the results of soccer games are the model for the indifferent way we relate the deaths in Kosovo or in the great lakes region of Africa, or even on the streets here at night. They are facts that happen, always distant (even if sensational), because they are homogenised and relegated to the media world.

Narration becomes "temporary" in art; representations that respond to the impossibility of any description of reality that could maintain the same values and ends through time. They are fragments of discourse that try to outline experiences and to establish a common plane.

So the following texts are a gathering of different stories from different geographical areas which tell us of individuals or cultural and political groups. There are neither heroes nor saints but images and situations that speak about ourselves and demonstrate our weaknesses, or that leave us with the smells and sensations of distant places. Sometimes they are precise attacks on our "Western" way of story-telling and our consideration of space (Jimmie Durham); or else they are invitations to reflect on the history of narration and those who narrate (Brian Wallis, and in different ways, Coco Fusco). Others begin with their own bodies, their limits and fears, in order to overcome them (Marina Abramovic); or even to narrate their own daily life and the lives of anonymous others, perhaps "stealing" from them and making the stories public (Sophie Calle). Sometimes narration appears linear but invests in subtle psychological aspects and technical capabilities (Stan Douglas); or the images from which a story departs actual "construct" the story itself (William Kentridge). Some narration is based upon the attempt to involve the spectator "musically" in space (Pipilotti Rist).

While spatial elements often characterise this narration, they are not more important than the temporal: most of the works presented here are installations through which the visitor must move and act; he or she cannot remain a passive recipient of an image with only one point of view. To accentuate this aspect, many of the video installations use looping, so there's never a beginning or end; they try to involve the viewer in a continually repeating situation. A moment of temporal progression that is closed inside itself, almost to make a mirror of the media world present outside. One difference from cinema is that there are no identifications with the story's "lead" actors and actresses, the films tend to remain self-conscious. Movement, numerous possibilities within space, to "interact" with representations, become essential to the stories being told.

I hope that these texts (left for the most part as verbatim transcriptions of the conference) evidence the variety of the artists' positions and thoughts in respect to this particular aspect of art. It's a complexity that can't help but shed light upon the reflection on and, in some cases, refusal of the information flux around us, in favour of greater temporal stratification. I believe that the use of narration by so many artists can be a way of deepening the field, establishing ties with the past and the future without in any way being a slave to tradition and its aspirations.

1 In this regard, literary material may be self-defeating, but I would like to point out the contributions of Marc Augé (who was a guest of La generazione delle immagini 3: The City of Interventions) who focuses his latest book, La Guerre des rêves. Exercises d'ethno-fiction, (Ed. du Seuil, 1997) on the confusion and amalgamation of existing relations between individual imagination (dreams), collective imagination (myths and the symbolic world) and narrative fiction, and the consequent crumbling of specific borders in every culture between dreams, reality and fiction.

2 See also the reflections of Paul Virilio, who writes: "The great narratives of theoretical causality have been penetrated by the small narratives of practical opportunity and, finally, by the micronarratives of autonomy. The question this poses is not related to the "crisis of modernity" as a progressive decline of common ideals - proto-foundation of the meaning of History, benefited by more or less restrictive stories, tied to the autonomous development of the individual - as much as to the crisis of the story itself, that is, a discourse or mode of official representation, heir to the Renaissance and ultimately tied to its capacity, universally recognised, to say, describe and inscribe the real. In this sense, the crisis of the notion of "story" appears as the other face of the crisis of the notion of "dimension" as geometrical story, a discourse of measurement of the real visibly offered to all. The crisis of the great narrative to the advantage of the micro-narrative reveals itself, in the end, as the crisis of the narrative of the "great" and as the crisis of the narrative of the "small", advent of a misinformation in which the mismeasure and immeasurability that find "postmodernity" as the philosophical solution to problems and the resolution of the image (pictorial, architectonic...) were at the origins of the Enlightenment." (L'espace critique, Bourgeois Ed. 1984, Italian translation Lo spazio critico, ed. Dedalo, Bari, 1988). (ed: English translation here from the Italian translation).

3 On this subject see Michael Sorkin, "Welcome to Sim City," in Sguardi Planetari: La generazione delle immagini 2 (curated by R. Pinto and M. Senaldi), City Council of Milan, 1996. The American architect writes: "Canal Street is used as an artery by cross Manhattan traffic and is a perpetual disaster area. Crossing it, as I do twice a day, I've tried to invent strategies of amelioration. Such fantasies have a long history. One of Robert Moses' last great initiatives was an attempt to build an expressway across (and destroying) SoHo, to link the bridge and tunnel on opposite sides of the island currently joined by Canal. The only real solution to the problem of Canal Street is the elimination of the traffic. The fix is not technical: the disgorging tunnel must simply be closed. There is no politician in the world with nerve for this fact, alas.

Once we've made it to the other side of Canal, we're on the home stretch. Two summers ago, this little parking lot was swarming with carpenters who were busily erecting two historic buildings. The smaller of them was a little house which appeared to be of early 19th-century vintage. Next door, across the party wall, was a lot building of cast iron and brick, seemingly about 75 years more recent. On the ground floor of the little house was a desperately authentic-looking snack bar/luncheonette. The entire ensemble took about two weeks to build. Who, of course, but Hollywood could have been responsible?

For weeks, the neighbourhood had been papered with announcements describing the upcoming production, apologising for any potential inconvenience and generally trying to engage the community with the thrill of having a film set in its midst. And it was thrilling: the swarms of scenographers distressing plywood into rhapsodic verisimilitude; the evening the rainmaking gantries arrived and inundated Franklin Street; the morning we saw Bridget Fonda drinking cappuccino in Bubby's cafe with Harvey Keitel. A flyer disseminated by the production company explained just why they were doing it. The main setting for the film was the snack bar, scene of an encounter between a policeman and a waitress that set the whole narrative into motion. According to the flyer, location scouts had scoured all of New York looking for just the right site in which all of this might take place. But after looking at thousands of locations, they were unable to come up with a single one that satisfied their requirements for authenticity, and so arose the decision to make the simulacrum, a fiction more real that any of the available realities."