Golden Goose Celebrates the Apocalyptic Vision of Marco Brambilla

“It’s rather Busby Berkely meets Hieronymus Bosch,” observed a fellow partygoer at Golden Goose’s recent pre-Venice Biennale bash. The “it” in question was Marco Brambilla’s vast scrolling video screen entitled Heaven’s Gate, the culmination in a series of six video loops by the film director-turned-artist whose specialty is stitching together hundreds of cinematic memories to surprising effect. The show, called Altered States, was staged at the sneaker and fashion brand’s HQ in Marghera, close to the lagoon of Venice, and timed to coincide with the preview days of the Venice Biennale. It was the latest installment in an ongoing effort by the brand to act as a cultural touchpoint beyond fashion in the city which it calls home.

“Cinema has always provided a kind of escapism,” Brambilla told me at the event. “And, in the world in which we now live, escapism is an essential component to our daily lives. I took the title Altered States from the 1980 Ken Russell movie about hallucinations and dream states. So, the overall show not only takes the title from the film, but draws similarly from fragments of memory, and plays with the way we remember things versus the way things really were.”

In the courtyard outside, an earlier work by Brambilla welcomed guests with another scrolling video—this time with the camera turned 180 degrees to focus on cinema from real life. On the screen, the moviegoers morph into a hundred faces, reacting with shock, amusement, awe, and fear to the unseen screen. Brambilla, 65, has been crafting these compelling and discomforting loops since the early aughts. “You're watching an audience watching a film,” he says. “You don't see what's on the screen, but you feel a range of emotions through their expressions; we're exposed to fragments the way I think of time. I tend to think of it in a nonlinear way.”

Heaven’s Gate, the Berkley-meets-Bosch piece, created by Brambilla 3 years ago, is a fascinating piece of work, featuring thousands of moving images clipped from movies and patchworked together into a nonsensical and sensory dreamscape that is both thrilling and highly unsettling. It’s Dante’s five circles of hell populated by King Kong, Charlie Chaplin, Amadeus, and Audrey Hepburn (and hundreds more)—all woven seamlessly into an apocalyptic moving tapestry. Everywhere you look there is a distant cinematic memory. A confirmed film buff could spend months parsing it all out. Far better to just dive in.