CINEMASCOPE

Cinemascope — Chantal ride is a collaborative diary by Gaia Credentino and Anna Papa. Gaia rewrites Anna’s text by hand and weaves it together with her own photographs and collages across the pages of a physical notebook. Orbiting the figure of Chantal Ak

Cinemascope — Chantal ride is a diary made by four hands: a text by Anna Papa, rewritten by hand by Gaia Credentino and assembled with her photographs and collages inside a physical notebook, to be read and looked at. The pages presented here are scans of that diary.

Anna’s text sits somewhere between memoir, diary, essay and autofiction. It records the experience of going to the cinema, alone, in the dark: notes that can’t be read because the projector light was badly placed, lists of the reactions a film provokes (irritation, hope, envy, nostalgia, panic, laughter, tears, et cetera). Gaia copies these words onto the page, and in doing so transforms them. The handwriting grows, shrinks, crosses out, breaks across the fold of the notebook. Around it she places her own photographs, film stills, record sleeves, book covers, portraits, and an archive of images arranged in a grid that is left unfinished. On the page, writing becomes image and image becomes writing again.

The work turns around Chantal Akerman, a filmmaker who moved between cinema, installation and writing without settling in any one of them. (The title is also a play on words: in Italian, Chantal ride means “Chantal laughs”.) Alongside her stands Maya Deren’s reminder that the amateur is, by origin, a lover. Amateurism here is not a lack but a form of devotion: to cinema, to photography, to writing, to each other’s work.

At its core, Cinemascope is about creative processes and ideas that are afraid of taking shape, of being forced into a single medium. The project deliberately has no final form. Born as a diary, it can become a book, an installation in which Anna performs the text with sound design, a performance, or something not yet imagined. The only condition is that none of these forms is ever the last one. Words should not be caged.

This resistance to a fixed form mirrors our identities as artists and as women: plural, unfinished, unwilling to be reduced to one definition or one discipline. The collaboration itself embodies this. Two hands, two voices, one text that belongs to both, and pages where it is no longer possible to say exactly where one of us ends and the other begins.