Juana Anzellini

Anzellini did this project between the graphic workshops at the Arts Academy in Leipzig and her Berlin studio, located in front of the Stasi/Hohenschönhausen jail (East Germany Secret Police). In the movie “The life of the others”, a Stasi agent tells his colleague, who is in charge of spying on a suspect artist: “Your guy Deryman is a Type 4, a genuine hysteric anthropocentric. He cannot live alone, he always needs to talk and needs to be among friends. We shouldn ́t take him to trial. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with this kind of people. Complete isolation without an exit date.” This movie clip depicts how isolation can stop art’s potential to transform life; paradoxically, it is literally in front of a Stasi jail, where Juana vehemently highlights art’s transforming potential. She brings archive material to life, which cuts across the social history of the Italian erotic comic and her own personal life story

In this case, the archival material Juana uses is a series of comics from the seventies and the eighties that were reprinted for the Colombian market by Luigi Anzellini, her grandfather. He came to Colombia in 1955 at the impetus of his Colombian wife, Celia Fajardo, who was finishing her Master's Degree in Art History in Florence, Italy. Thanks to the connections he made while working at “Olivetti,” a defunct Italian typewriter company, Juana´s grandfather found a business opportunity by buying the reproduction rights of these comics for Latin America. This project included reprinting and translating the comics from Italian to Spanish, which he did himself. The Latino versions of these comics were distributed in and from Colombia to other countries in South America. They were sold in magazine stands and stores throughout the country. For years, these comics became part of the social imaginary and became a popular cultural reference for millions of people.