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PAN cinema and photography Association Muralto was born from a meeting between the cultural operator Jean Olaniszyn and the artist Liberio Bianchi, when, each one with their respective contributions to knowledge and skills, decided to found this new association involving since its beginning the artist-director-musician Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta and the cinema critic Davide Rossi. Beyond them, there are photographer Roby Imfeld, director Misha Tognola and video maker Yanik M. Marcolli. Others will be involved in the project, each one bringing his or her own specific contribution.

 

Direction

Liberio Bianchi, president: libe@bluewin.ch
Jean Olaniszyn, operations director: jeanolanisky@gmail.com
Davide Rossi, artistic director: annaseghers@libero.it

Responsible for the experimental cinema section "Baladrüm"
Emanuel Pimenta: edmp@emanuelpimenta.net

 

The name PAN appeared from a question and a research. What idea could, in some way, synthesize all activities of the association? The answer was clear: thought.
Then, we walked back, to the origins of the word "thought", which is pensiero in Italian, penser in French and similar in all Romance languages.
The Romance words for thought appears from the Latin "pendere", linked to the idea of weight. When we think, we "weight", in some way, our sensory inputs.
If we go further in the past, we discover that the Latin "pendere" emerges from the radical P in the Indo European which was a set of languages disappeared about 20.000 years ago, and that originated Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. The Indo European P meant the idea of purification - from it we have our word "pure", for example. It is very interesting that purity and purification are in the deepest origins of our Romance word for "think".
From the radical P we have a short Indo European word: PAN which means "vital blow and purification" - as if we could imagine in it the formation of thought. Something pure is a clear, identifiable thing, which is precisely the sense of the word intelect: to "select among".

The visual form of PAN was also fruit of a research made by Emanuel Pimenta. The challenge was to have some simple and clear image that could transmit the essence of the association's activities. Always when we are looking to the future, obligatorily, we are also looking at the past - if not, we would be looking at something different. And the future is present in all times. It is the challenge of knowledge. The philosopher Emanuel Kant said that "the hand is the visible part of the brain". And we were dealing exactly with that: thought! Then, in a kind of archeological experience, Pimenta made a large photographic essay at one of the two oldest Romanesque church in Ticino: Colleggiata San Vittore il Moro, in Muralto, which the old documents of its existence are from the year 879. There he found a formidable fresco dated of around the year 1140. It was the hand!