Comparing local spectres is a film essay whose subject is the history of a specific place within the history of film, and the history of certain films related to this place. The project focuses on the site of the former film studios of St. Maurice near Paris, founded in 1913 and destroyed by fire in 1971: later in the 1970s, an apartment complex, Le Panoramis, was built there.

The central subject of the video Apartment that is based on a scene of J.-L. Godard’s Le mépris (1963) can be said to be the intersection of human and technological gaze. The work focuses on the central and over-long sequence in which Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli portrait a couple who are about to split up.

“Working less, working all”.
This is the idea from which Gianluca Abbate and Lello Voce developed their concept. It was a signature slogan during the
political unrest in Italy in 1977 and it is still relevant in a world where human labour and technological progress are trying to
coexist with mixed results. So, the poem Il lavoro cieco, written and played by Lello Voce and published in Il fiore inverso, takes life in the latest work by Abbate. Through images and sequences created by combining collage and digital animation techniques,
the director manages to express the wish for emancipation and freedom of contemporary workers as human beings.

A dream-like atmosphere distinguishes
the second chapter of the trilogy
by Gianluca Abbate about contemporary society and the relationship between individuals and landscape. The welcoming and soft voice of a woman
invites viewers to fully relax and surrender to the background noise: the chaos of the industrialised world populated
with passers- by, tourists and busy shops. In such a chaotic landscape, where living space seems to be reduced, a sudden change is produced by immersing
the viewers in an underwater landscape. A polluted sea which suddenly becomes populated with colourful micro- organisms, where a voice-over invites us to sleep.

After the first successful experience in 2014, Gianluca Abbate and
Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri have come together
again and tell, by employing visual psychedelic effects, how May Day is celebrated in Italy. It is a day full of music, joy and entertainment with hundreds of young people dancing and singing all together at a concert.

By applying the technique of animated collage which is characteristic of his video-art works, Gianluca Abbate has shot a seven- minute-long panoramic overview to describe the
over-populated world where we live in. It is the first chapter of a trilogy dedicated to contemporary society and the relationship between humans and cities. It shows that there is no more space for a single person, but there is only an overflowing river of individuals without proportion or living space available.