ARKFILMLAB was born in Naples from the desire to extend the collective experience of the preexisting ARKFOTOLAB to the cinema practice.
In 1994, almost at the same time of the occupation of the third floor of the faculty of architecture, a dark room was set up that allowed only students to develop and print their own shots. To date, the use of the darkroom is open to everyone and the laboratory, without changing the dynamics of independence and self-management, has expanded its collective vision, promoting collective paths of production, encounter and reflection. The desire to keep alive the interest in analogue photography and cinema is expressed by the various projects that ARKFILMLAB has been promoting. First and most representative of all, the SMORFIA. First published in 2005, entirely made in analogue, it is currently a collective exhibition of photographs, drawings, films and silkscreen prints of social investigation based on the 90 issues of the Neapolitan cabala which is repeated every year and is open to everyone who wants to participate. Every year the INCONTRI A LUCI ROSSE program is repeated, a series of practical workshops and theoretical meetings on analogue photography and cinema.
The ARKFILMLAB organizes during the year workshops and screenings of experimental cinema with film-makers from Italy and abroad, participates in the production of movies, collective and not, provides the basic equipment to work on super8 film (very low cost b / w films, cameras, tanks and processing solutions, and, soon, an optical printer for the passage of images from super8 to 16mm).
The darkroom, in addition to being open to all “technicians” every day, organizes theoretical-practical meetings for beginners, in order to transmit knowledge and share spaces and ideologies.
Destroy the image, defend the imagination!
