Women CineMakers, Special Edition, vol 3 by WomenCinemakers

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MARIA GALL CHARLOTTE VAN WINDEN YIDAN XIE KATHI SCHULZ RACHEL GRUIJTERS JENNY E. BALISLE LYNN DENNISON & GEN DOY RIIKKA HAAPASAARI LAUREL BECKMAN EMELIE MAHDAVIAN A still from The Little Wave, 2016 A work by Riikka Haapasaari

INDEPENDENT

WOMENâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S CINEMA VOL III

cINEMAKERS W O M E N

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Contents 04 Emelie Mahdavian

100 Rachel Gruijters

Intangible Body

Do Not Forget

120

Laurel Beckman

Kathi Schulz

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Stonewall in My Navel

Sequence One

140

Riikka Haapasaari

Yidan Xie

162

Lynn Dennison & Gen Doy

Charlotte van Winden

Little Wave

Greenham Common

The Classic of Mountains and Seas

Why I Never Became A Stalker

188

Jenny E. Balisle

Maria Gall

FALL

An artistic point of view

Emelie Mahdavian Lives and works in San Francisco Bay Area and the Lost River Valley, Idaho

This experimental film explores censorship of Iranian women's dance performance and what constitutes a woman's "body" in the digital age. I am both a dancer and a filmmaker, and my 2016 feature documentary After the Curtain portrays the struggles of four dancers in Tajikistan facing social stigma as a result of their artistic careers. Intangible Body continues exploring many of these themes through the lens of experimental film: dance in the Persian world, gender, and social and political censorship. However, Intangible Body also re-thinks these questions for the digital age. The idea emerged as a response to the situation of dancer Aisan Hoss. As an Iranian dancer living and working abroad, she was concerned about putting her work on the internet. Would she ever be able to return home? How could she avoid being recognized? In Iran, even animated films are censored to remove sequences of women dancing. The idea was born to make an animated film in which the woman dancerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body is abstracted, and yet ever-present. We wanted to pose the question: in the digital age, what is a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body? what is dance? Given that women "dancing" in public has been illegal since the Iranian Revolution, we set out to play with the edge of what constitutes a body, a dance, and an Iranian woman. Created via motion capture composited with video, the film has three layers, each representing one aspect of the dancer's body, but without any video of her figure appearing in the final film: the motion capture figure is controlled by an algorithm tied to the speed of the dancer's movement; the music is entirely sampled from her voice; and the fabric with which she danced was isolated in the video via chroma-keying to create a residue of her interaction with a prop that invokes the presence of the absent dancer. The piece was collaborative at every stage, and I want to acknowledge this work. Aisan Hoss created the choreography and performed the dance for the cameras, and it is her personal journey from which the inspiration for this work emerged. Gretchen Jude, who is an accomplished acoustic-electronic musician collaborating with me on my new project Midnight Traveler, composed the original score using recordings of Aisan reading Iranian folk tales. The computer-science team (Jesse Smith, Shunxu Huang, and Prof. Michael Neff) handled all aspects of the motion capture process. I also want to acknowledge the UC Davis ModLab and Prof. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli for their support of the project.

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Emelie Mahdavian Lives and works in San Francisco Bay Area and the Lost River Valley, Idaho

An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant Intangible Body is a captivating video by Emelie Mahdavian: inquiring into the censorship of Iranian women's dance performance and what constitutes a woman's "body" in the digital age, she initiates her audience into an unconventional and highteneed visual experience capable of triggering the audience perceptual and cultural parameters. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Mahdavian's multifaceted artistic production. Hello Emelie and welcome to WomenCinemakers: to start this interview would you tell us something about your backgroound? Are there any experiences that did particularly influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

There are some recurring elements in my work (eg. dance, Persian culture, gender, an interest

in experimental media) that come from my own training and experiences, yes. I am myself a lifelong dancer and musician, a student of Persian literature, and a scholar of contemporary media. So, these elements seem to return in each work in different ways. For example, my first feature After the Curtain and this piece are explicitly dance films, but even my new project has a strong connection to the notion of embodiment through the use of mobile phone cameras. Some of these influences or connections are clear to me as I conceive of a project, but other through-lines I think emerge more intuitively as a result of my training or experiences - and then afterwards I see how they connect to past works. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your usual set up and process? In particular, do you think that there is that connect all your works?

As I began to describe just now, I do think there are some central themes: bodies and media, gender and cultural politics, and intercultural experience. But I also think that each project seems to me, at the moment that it begins, as

For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting video that our readers have already staterd to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of this project is the way you have provided the visual results of your analysis with coherent and combination between . While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell what was your initial inspiration?

Today in the West, for artists, marketing and creating an online presence for your work is crucial to finding an audience. By contrast, in Iran, where women are not able to dance publicly, dance classes are advertised through underground means. This entirely different approach protects the artists, but means that their work is not discoverable to a wider audience. I realized that this statecreated censorship also effects Iranian artists living in diaspora — if they are considering returning home in the future. The dancer in our project was in that situation; she was highly accomplished, but still protecting her identity and online presence to avoid Iranian state surveillance. This was a disadvantage to her in the West, where there is an expectation that an artist’s work is available on the internet. This was where the idea for this project emerged — to make a film that would feature her work without featuring her “body.” And, since animated depictions of

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something new and different. Looking at my own work from a certain distance, I see these elements more critically and I recognize that there is a certain cohesion between pieces and performances that I undertook at very different points in my artistic development.

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

So, in fact, the work began from this conceptual beginning, and then took aesthetic form. The computer scientists and I were also, of course, very interested in the motion capture work, design, and compositing for its own sake, but the aesthetic choices we made were guided by this initial impulse to push the boundary of what constitutes a “woman dancing” by building as much material as possible out of the dancer’s body without directly representing her. You are both a dancer and a filmmaker: would you tell us if was it important for you to make a personal film, that touched your familiary sphere, something you knew a lot about?

Yes, being a dancer myself, and having performed both contemporary dance and traditional styles of Persian and Central Asian dance, I am very interested in the way that nostalgic notions of identity shape performance of folk and traditional dance. Consequently, I also love work that breaks those false boundaries between “modernity” and “tradition.” Often, this type of exploration can touch on the way that we envision other aspects of cultural belonging: for example what it means to be “feminine,” how gestures are tied to different cultural practices, and even the ways that we invent imagined pasts in times of nationalist fervor. So, from this one area of specific personal experience (in this case, the dance tradition and contemporary politics of Iran), we can actually expand outwards into an analysis of a whole range of socio-political topics.

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women dancing are also censored in Iran, I knew that we would need to work in abstract figures.

Emelie Mahdavian Photo by RJ Muna, San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival

". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Joep van Lieshout's works, could be considered , do you think that could be considered a political work? Moreover, what could be in your opinion the role of filmmakers in our unstable contemporary age?

Intangible Body is absolutely a political work. Dance and gender are political topics in Iran (and, in fact, in the West too) and our concept began from an anti-surveillance stance. Sometimes today in America, I hear certain groups deriding humanities scholars and artists as irrelevant, or implying that their work is frivolous. Meanwhile in Iran, artists and humanities scholars are subjected to a tremendous amount of state surveillance and are often arrested and even tortured as a consequence of their work. In Iran, the state is quite clear that it recognizes the political significance of the arts and humanities, while in America I see a rhetoric that attempts to write us out of the political discourse. To me, both approaches are an attempt to regain control of the political discourse; an attempt to ensure that the political power of critical aesthetic works is blunted. So yes, I see all of my work as political, even when, or perhaps especially when, it also employs aesthetic, nonnarrative approaches. How much important is for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to urge them to elaborate personal meanings and associations?

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explores censorship of Iranian women’s dance performance and what constitutes a woman’s ”body” in the digital age: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

is entirely sampled from The soundtrack of the dancer's voice and provides the film with such minimalistic and at the same time uncanny atmosphere: according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects contemporary societies favoring that occurred with the advent of the visual logic, alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you see the relationship between sound and moving images?

This is a large question… Of course, thinking historically, the sound-image question also refers to the shift that occurred in moving pictures with the advent of synch sound, which we all know often subjugated the image to the technological needs and narrative power of sound. On the other hand, cinema theorists and viewers have both tended to privilege the idea of cinema as a visual medium, to the detriment of a discussion of the significance of sound. As I mentioned, I am a musician, so I am extremely interested in the role of sound design and composition in my works, and I don’t usually see one

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To be honest, in my documentary films I think much more about this. In an experimental work such as Intangible Body, we were really focused on the concept itself and not thinking too much about how it would be received by the audience. The only exception to this was our use of the fabric as a dance prop: we wanted to make sure that the image of the veil was subverted in a way that didn’t also create an “unveiling” narrative. That type of thinking about Muslim women has historically very problematic in the West. Rather, the veil itself is a potent “prop” in contemporary Iranian femininity and we wanted to toy with it as one residual layer of her embodied performance.

In the case of Intangible Body, I’m not sure to what extent the audience is aware of the layering of the image and sound as distinct expressions of the dancer’s embodiment and in what moments audio-vision is in play. At the conceptual level, we really did approach the three layers as distinct and the sound/music was added after the image was complete. Yet even with this said, there are quite a few moments in which the sound and image work together; there are beats and shifts in mood that happen simultaneously. Also, the voice is, arguably, the least mediated element of the dancer’s body: it is all her voice, altered to greater or lesser degrees by our wonderful composer Gretchen Jude, but also ringing through clearly at other moments. In Iran, it is also illegal for women to sing solo in public, so what we did with the music was, again, toying with the legal boundaries of this censorship. If this is recognizably a musical work, and it is entirely derived from one woman’s voice, does it constitute a legal transgression even if she doesn’t “sing” in the traditional sense? The motion capture figure is controlled by an algorithm tied to the speed of the dancer’s movement: how would you consider the role of technology in your process? In particular, how is in your opinion technology affecting the consumption of art?

Well, in this work, the various technologies provided the mediating layer that allows us to “remove” the woman’s body from the work. This was our central question: can one remove the body while also using only the body as the material of the project?

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element as subjugated to, or supporting the other. Chion’s idea of audio-vision is the most influential on my thinking as a filmmaker. In essence, Chion argues that the image and sound together create a new, unique sensory experience, which he calls “audiovision.” This critical lens allows us to bypass the notional of one element being “essential” and focus instead on the sensory experience that sound and image create together.

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

To really dive into the effect of technology on the consumption of art would be a dissertation in itself, but to return this piece I can say this: the problem of self-branding and marketing in the age of the internet was part of the impetus for the project. It was the dancerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s need to retain anonymity in this sphere, where we now expect to be able to discover and consume everything that exists, that sparked the idea for the film. was collaborative at every stage and it's no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations are today ever growing forces and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, Peter Tabor once stated that " ": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between creative people from different fields?

Yes, there were quite a few people contributing creative and technical skill to the project that spanned different fields, and my role was to guide and be the connective thread of that collaboration along the path of our concept. Each stage was collaborative, but often each stage also occurred separately with only the dancer Asian Hoss and I participating along the whole journey. So, for example, we began with the motion capture, which was done by Jesse Smith and Prof. Michael Neff, and when Jesse had cleaned up all of the motion capture data, it was handed off to Shunxu Huang, who did the Maya Design. He would send me various mock-ups and we tweaked the idea until the algorithm achieved the effect I was looking for. Meanwhile, Aisan and I shot the video of the veil and I digitally removed everything but the veil from that video image. And, finally, we recorded sound of Aisan reading and translating some old Iranian folk stories, and this is what Gretchen used to create the music. I composited and edited together all these layers, which at that point felt like a process of going from stitched-together separate elements to something more aesthetically-cohesive. It did come together, however, and I think this was because all through the

collaborative process we were working with the same, clear conceptual goal. We each brought elements that enhanced the final whole by contributing aesthetic ideas from different fields, so the final project was much richer as a consequence of the collaborative process. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema?

Well, I think it is important to distinguish between women working in the industry of cinema, women working independently (and hopefully finding financing), and content that forwards a feminist viewpoint. Sometimes we get caught up in looking (rightfully) to put women behind the camera, but the depth of our critical discussion of media and gender representation is lost in the process. Fanon described a type of post-colonial ruler who is local but nonetheless replicates the dynamics of the colonizers. I want to make sure that women directors don’t emerge who produce work that replicates old patterns of misogyny and objectification — this is particularly a risk when it comes to representations of women of color and in how we disseminate work by non-Western women who have their own cultural and political concerns. That said, I do believe we need more women directors, as well as women grips, gaffers, teamsters, and ADs. Hollywood is not a friendly-to-women work environment, and like other industries women can contend with all sorts of on-the-job harassment when they infiltrate these historically-male departments. I’m glad there has been a lot more conversation about diversity in Hollywood, but I worry that this may just create a new “market” that studios

Umstulpen, 2016, Performance with Video Installation. Dawn Nilo

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Emelie. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

It has been useful to me to reflect on this completed work as I start my new project, so thank you for these thoughtful questions about the piece. I do have a new piece that is now all-consuming. I am collaborating on a feature documentary called Midnight Traveler that follows the struggles of a family of Afghan filmmakers on the run from the Taliban. Told from refugee-Director Hassan Fazili’s unique first-person perspective, their story provides unprecedented access to the refugee experience and its portrayal in Western media. We have received a Bay Area Video Coalition National Media Maker Fellowship and a Points North Institute Fellowship to support the project, and I will be traveling to Serbia for an artist residency this September-October so that we can collaborate on the project in person. That project should be done in about 12 months, so keep your eyes out for in then.

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temporarily look to meet without fundamentally altering their business model. In the US, we have actually seen a slight regression since the 1980s in the number of women directing union films. So, again, I don’t want to throw cold water on the conversation, but I think we need to ask, “What went wrong last time?” If we see the future as an inevitable march towards progress, we may miss the issue at hand. Now, in countries that have more extensive state funding of independent film, as some European countries do, we have seen that rather incredible change can happen quickly with determined leadership. To me, this model shows that to correct the gender imbalance in media-making, we need to look at what modes of production have been able to make this shift more easily and which ones (eg. the studio system) have proved exceptionally resistant to that change.

Laurel Beckman Lives and works in Santa Barbara, California, USA In my work I strive for visual and conceptual richness, pleasure and open curiosity, while privileging uncertainty and humor over conventional narrative approaches. In the video projects “stuff happens”, and is fully entrance-able through visuals and sound, though outcomes are suspended in favor of layered meaning. My work investigates affect, stage & screen space, science & consciousness; and has screened in festivals, public spaces, museums and galleries throughout the US, and abroad in over 30 countries including Spain, Canada, Italy, Palestine, Australia, France, India, Brazil, Switzerland, Macau, Iran, Peru, China, and the Netherlands. I’m a professor of Experimental Video/Animation at the University of California Santa Barbara, USA. It’s Stonewall in My Navel The impulse to daydream (causing impatience or disassociation in 1st part of video) is met with a forbidding twitch towards darkness that denies the benefit of getting lost in your mind. In the video, the navel-gazing subject travels inside and outside her body, where her navel plays host to revelers at Stonehenge and Stonewall. Uncertain histories, monumental status and ritual are teased and morphed between the two sites. The Stonewall Inn, site of the liminal 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, was a dance bar. Such places concretize dreams and consequences of queer-dom in the 20th century and beyond (see Pulse slaughter, 2016). Stonewall itself is modeled here based on first person accounts of the iconic bar, where against the full-moon early morning hours of June 28, 1969, queers raged against oppression. They threw pennies, bricks, beer bottles, a trash-can, and a parking meter. In the video they, we, and those tools of rebellion dance, affirming that celebration and protest are not mutually exclusive. It’s Stonewall in My Navel is indebted to: Shirley Bassey, 1968, “This Is My Life (La vita)”, written by Bruno Canfora, Antonio Amurri, Norman Newell The Friends of Distinction, 1969, "Grazing in the Grass”, written by Philemon Hou (both songs were on the June 1969 Stonewall back-room jukebox) Bob Fosse, director, and all the dancers in “Sweet Charity”, 1969 film Elizabeth Folk, Kate Sorensen, and the Stonewall Veterans’ Association

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Laurel Beckman Lives and works in Santa Barbara, California, USA

An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant It’s Stonewall in My Navel is a captivating film by multi-disciplined artist Laurel Beckman: through an effective non linear narrative approach, she initiates her audience into an unconventional and heightened visual experience, addressing the viewers to a multilayered visual experience. Hello Laurel and welcome to WomenCinemakers: to start this interview we would ask you a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you degreed with a MFA of Art from the prestigious California Institute of the Arts: how did this experience influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum and your travels inform the way you relate yourself to art making in general? Greetings WomenCinemakers and readers. It’s always a privilege to be able to talk about my work, and I’m really happy to do so. I attended Cal Arts in the formative 1970’s, and the combination of those two things (the school and the time period) has been extremely

formative throughout my career, both as an artist and a teacher. Like any teenager and young adult, I couldn’t have been fully aware just how much the environment would contribute to my attitudes and ideals. And I think the reverse may be true too, I hope that I contributed to the climate and evolving legacy of Cal Arts. Cal Arts did not have grades, rather they had ‘experience reports’; instead of a staid curriculum, they had wildly innovative and pertinent classes, and at the core was independent studies and mentorship. Other important aspects include proximity- everyone was basically in the same building, which led to heightened curiosity and participatory, interdisciplinary learning. I remember critiques in the hallways, open for anyone; everything felt possible. The fact that the faculty were/are artists first and foremost, and not academics, is key. It was all about the work, the ‘conversation’, the experience, rather than, say, categorizing or branding. Exciting times! The presence of the Feminist Art Program and feminist art history classes was as critical as the persistent experimentation with forms and ideas. All of these things I mention are the backbone of my work, I don’t like (event tacit) boundaries or preoccupation with what others think, I value free-association and true exploration in the work. You are a versatile artist and your practice ranges from video and public projects: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit http://www.laurelbeckman.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work: while

There are threads that surface when I consider my work in total. In terms of themes, there are notions that everything is sentient, and increasingly present, that looking closely is the same as or at least parallel with looking loosely- by that I mean that while I’m detail oriented, critical and focused, I concurrently consider what I see/feel/think- what’s there, with, say, the equivalent of seeing a bunny in the clouds. A pretty normal human impulse that’s thwarted by a cultural imperative towards conservative ideals of documentary, use, and goodness. I’m of the opinion that truth is fugitive and I believe in the power of fiction. I tend towards absurdity and humor as tools in the face of serious themes. Other threads are a poetic approach to our cultural environment, in critique and in appreciation, and an insistence on questioning given truths and authority. I’m just hard-wired that way; and I recognize that all folks aren’t and that’s ok. I’m a hippy inside and an organized driven person on the outside. As a visual artist it’s important to address aesthetics and form. There’s a visual thread in my work, though at the same time I constantly try to break it! In attempts to shake the stronghold of the frame, I fancy black space with prominent color breaks, and erratic round/other shapes. I appreciate abstraction alongside representational imagery, which i think may be a good analog for my playful/serious nature. Video in particular is rich with visual and sonic possibility, and its evolving place in the continuum of film/video including presentation and delivery platforms; that’s one of things I love about it, there’s so much to explore and do. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected It’s Stonewall in My Navel, an extremely interesting film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. While walking our readers through the genesis of It’s Stonewall in My Navel, would you tell us how you developed the initial idea? I tend to do a major video project every year or two, in addition to shorter pieces. Since so much of the work is frame by frame manipulation, a major piece

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walking us through your process, would you like to tell to our readers something about the evolution of your multidisciplinary approach? In particular, do you think that there is a central idea that connect all your works?

The navel is a membrane between the outside and inside of the body; alongside it’s own genesis story, it’s also funny. The idea of having a story in there, such as it is, is also funny- the idea that you’re host to life of another order. That brings me to the pairing/juxtaposition of aliens and queers (my favored term for LGBTQ folks, such as myself). They are much the same, fabulous and strange. Needless to say, I not an assimilationist. The mythology of Stonehenge’s origins (alien built?), and the fact that it was and continues to be a ritual ground with prominent rocks and a definable shape, is for me a lovely analogy with queers dancing and that one night, rebelling, at the famed Stonewall Inn in the 1960’s. The Stonewall was built around and includes a stone wall. And of course to stonewall is to resist through refusal. The first half of the piece I play out what it might be to shaken from a state of daydreaming to one that’s faced with the dark issues of the world. I use subjective daydreams of my own, and employ that material and time to do two things: one- to establish a culturally pervasive antagonist of daydreaming (and imagination in general), and to ‘perform’ that by structuring the first half so the viewer gets anxious; as in, can’t get a grip on, or, is it over yet? Intended as it is, I’ve found this part of the video to be a difficult hurdle for some viewers. It’s a risk worth taking for me. From all that, the making of the video proceeded pretty much through my own imagination and process, along with research and kinks in the making that are generally beneficial. I tend to work chronologically, and truthfully, I move with a continual refinement of what I want from scene to scene with a lot of improvisation along the way. That’s the fun part. Practically speaking, researching what the interior of the 1969 Stonewall Inn looked like was important; with only

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could be 5-10 minutes. At the time I started It’s Stonewall in My Navel, I was thinking of two things- one, poetic but problematic alliterations (I was thinking about Stonehenge/Stonewall, and of Ramallah/Ramadan), and of having a fragmented narrative, a sort of dynamic diorama, take place in my navel. Or your navel. The merger was organic and fruitfully in tune with absurd leaps in the action.

Your observation of social and psychological phenomena seems to be very analytical, yet It’s Stonewall in My Navel strives to be full of emotion: how would you consider the relationship between analysis and spontaneity within your work? In particular, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer to meticulously schedule every detail of your works? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? I consider myself to be emotion driven. A lot of my work involves the interplay of subjective experience and affect, and the neuroscience research that looks to understand affect through imaging and locative technologies. Analytical, maybe, but I experience my observation as a force that I have a hard time turning off. So, considered, yes, and as I mentioned, critical, in the sense of pointed and focused. In my work, I don’t care about analysis, that’s way too practical and has a goal of static understanding or certainty; I’m much more about making (I hope) affinities between how I feel and you might feel. That’s coupled with an almost righteous assertion of queerness of thought and action (in the old fashioned meaning of queer- as strange or odd). Honestly, I’m a big mush with what I’m told is a critical face. An interesting question for me is the relative ability for artists video/film to evoke emotion in the viewer. I think of strategies as different as Jesper Just, Marina Abramovic, and Tommy Hartung, that, while enacting and performing emotion, seem to both embrace and diverge from the cinematic emotional experience. Is it possible within experimental moving image work (in form and delivery) to engender emotion in the viewer through intent, is it desirable? I don’t meticulously plan or schedule details in my work, though with video a significant amount of methodology is needed to get things done, and it helps that I’m so organized. Because of my background as a visual artist in other

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two extant photographs (one exterior & one tight shot inside of a pair of revelers), I primarily used oral histories to 3D model the inside for the virtual dance bar part. The research revealed what was playing on the jukeboxes that night, as well as the physical layout of the inside, and critically, the objects the rebels hoisted at the abusive and arresting police. Those tools of rebellion, of dissent, figure largely in the soul of the video. The end, where the dance floor hosts the dancers and the tools (brick, trashcan, etc) is saying that dancing and rebellion are not mutually exclusive.

Your work accomplishes such insightful inquiry into the point of convergence between images that come from perceptual reality, as environment, and other ones that comes from imagination: how do you consider the relationship between imagination and reality within your work? That’s a big complement, thank you. I suspect that one part of coming up as an artist in the 70’s and 80’s is that I see reality as fluid, especially perceptual reality. A basic tenet of visual perception is that if you’re looking at something, you’re not looking at something else. It’s possible looking and seeing are different things. The interplay between one’s intention and actuality of attention is always of interest to me. What we care about. How does our will influence our imagination and vice-versa? An affiliated action- that of mis-interpretation, is important too. Like the bunny in the clouds, it’s amazing how everyday mis-interpretation of what we consume through our senses is so generative, crucial to (at least) my imagination. That’s likely the most coherent way I can describe the relationship between my reality and imagination. In It’s Stonewall in My Navel we can recognize lots of images riches with high symbolic values, as shadows and organic objects. German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about the importance of symbols in your video? And in particular how do you conceive the narrative and especially the visual unity for your works? In the big picture, I don’t see a meaningful separation between mediums and their content. The experience and influence of

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image-centric media (print & electronic multiples, collage), I see the making/production as process first, product second. The details tend to lead to each other as the process unfolds, full of improvisation in the moment and method in the long haul. I enjoy all of it.

Symbology is a conundrum. In order for a symbol to function, there has to be a consensus as to it’s meaning. I think there’s an understanding that symbolsstand ins for something else, are by nature a function of any representation. Ordinarily that would entail a remote entry into meaning, ‘a picture of’ resembling an experience rather than being one. The moving image has the ability to derail naturalistic sense in favor of providing an experience of its own, and perhaps that’s what Demand means after all. Of course, abstract film/video, in total or in part, brings heightened perceptual experience that’s closer to light and space art than the history of narrative film. I’m not sure my work has a narrative unity. Part of my artists statement is pertinent here, it says, “In my practice I strive for visual and conceptual richness, while privileging uncertainty, idiosyncratic humor, and the non sequitur over conventional narrative approaches. In the work “stuff happens”, and it is fully entrance-able through its visuals and sound, but certain outcomes are suspended in favor of layered meaning.” I’ve been working the relative presence of narrative throughout my works, and continue to. One thing is that I always begin projects with a kind of optimism about everything, including the themes, and yet the content often turns out rather dark. Not pessimistic, but let’s say, with a sense of mortality. As far as the visual unity, I’ve been making images for a long time and there’s a palpable sensibility that is both visual and conceptual, and I suspect the visual aspect is more easily discerned. In general, unity is not a goal, though enjoyment is; it’s not important to me to be able to easily summarize the work. The soundtrack plays a crucial role in the unity of It’s Stonewall in My Navel: according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you see the relationship between sound and moving images? Yes, that’s true, re: vision as the dominant field, though interestingly, it’s sound that gets to/through our body first before sight. I have, over the last many years, made many silent videos, mostly for public projections with no audio capacity. Occasionally I’ll revisit a silent work, such as the abstract Smile

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watching a film is due precisely to what film can deliver, including manipulations of time, narrative, sound, image, etc. The material (or immaterial) nature of analog film and digital video makes those manipulations possible.

Multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced remarked "that works of arts often continue to evolve after they have been realised, simply by the fact that they are conceived with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur". Do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? I believe more commonly that it’s the reception of art that evolves based on shifts in social and environmental change. Context is everything, and it’s plastic. It’s important to consider contextual shifts when viewing historical works; not everything is about us in the moment, though we may re-interpret it accordingly for different results. The role of the artist has been confused for sometime, with little agreement across cultures and time as to what and why we make art. I agree that digital technologies have ushered a sea change in most things really, though I see it as part of continuum of change in communication technologies, including visual ones. In art practice, the global nomad is the new player, envisioned as an artist/curator/dealer, concomitantly, there’s a surge of hyper-locality. Every new technology displaces old and facilitates new activity, and each has led to older forms and newer forms being re/invented by artists. In terms of media specificity, the digital environment has rendered that obsolete, which I see as a good thing. Consider the dual response to Bong Joon-Ho’s film, Okja: A standing ovation at Cannes quickly followed by boos at the Netflix production due to a distaste for streaming. Closer to home, is ‘moving image’ a good catch all term for contemporary film/video work? Perhaps; at least it includes implicit crossover potential with media including performance and installation, and so called new media. Self-identified new media moving image work

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#1 (studies in satisfaction), and add sound. In that case it improved the piece, though that doesn’t always happen. In most of my work, sound is critical, often, such as with the Stonewall piece, there’s recognizable music involved that drives the desired direction and emotional impact of the project. I’m also a fan and researcher of musical film and theater, of the relationship and divergence between the stage and the screen. Since sound moves through space in a way that images do not- we experience ourselves as contributors to what we see, whereas sound feels like it just happens, the punctuation sound facilitates is critical. And we don’t bring the same level of criticality and evaluation to sound as we do to imagery, which is very useful in generating an experience.

Besides producing the interesting works that our readers have admired in these pages, you are also a professor of Experimental Video/Animation and Public Practices at the University of California, Santa Barbara. How much does this experience inform your vision about Art? And in particular, do you ever get inspired from your students? I’m inspired by my students with regularity, though I also get disappointed when they don’t fully believe in, engage with, or innovate with their work. In a public research university such as UCSB, the mission of the campus is such that we serve a group of students with really diverse goals. Most of the students see art either as a luxury, gadfly, alien, or they don’t see it at all. As the general population, in the United States anyway, gets more conservative and frightened, they have less use for art of any kind, unless as an investment. A complex dynamic rife with economics, technology, psychology, politics and more. That’s the dark side, the bright side is that there’s tremendous activity in all areas of art practice, and that’s very positive. Over the years your works have been showcased in several occasions, including your recent participation to the Montreal Underground Film Festival: one of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are provided with of the the opportunity to become active participants and are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? Thank you! I hope to create involvement, and probably do that to the extent that the viewer is both witness and agent in making the meaning. Many people find my work odd or eccentric, and I fully embrace that while secretly finding it not

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often highlights the tools in their capacity and glitches, which as a gesture is not new; what is newish is the enhanced connectivity, raising issues about authorship and relevance. In that way a sensibility is evolving, and the role of the artist is now plural.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Laurel. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I’m currently in the middle of a series of videos that use historically noted tools of rebellion as foils to look at affect in relation to resistance, attention, currency, time, and waste. I’ve completed three of those, a forth’s in progress, and there will be six total. The series evolved from It’s Stonewall in My Navel, in that the tools used in the Stonewall rebellion are featured here, though not particularly as functional tools. After that, what’s moving around in my head includes incidentally placed small (10”-20”) works, thematically, more immovable things having to do with free-will, and a preoccupation with the feeling of surfacing. We’ll see how that aggregate evolves! Along more general lines, I’d like to see my work include more visual/aural experimentation, but mostly I just want to make work that surprises, delights, and engages the viewer and myself. Thank you for asking me to participate, and for your thoughtful and provocative questions. It’s a real pleasure to respond and to be a part of Women Film and Video makers everywhere.

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odd at all. The leaps are my norm. I do consider audience reception important, I want folks to watch my work, to experience it in multiple places and ways. I’ve done a lot of public video work, billboards, transit systems, street projection, and in these cases it’s the specificity of the site that is important to me. Not by way of censorship issues, but rather by attending to the physical experience of the audience at the location. Otherwise, my decisionmaking process considers the value of uncertainty, play, humor, and complexity in the work and its reception. I’m not clear if by language you mean the spoken/written word, or the language, say, of imagery. If it’s the former, most of my work, actually all of it so far, has no real spoken language, just some songs, a few utterances, and other sound; so that’s helpful in that the work travels well.

Riikka Haapasaari

My practice is project-based, branching intentionally across cultures - it is this change and being always an outsider that enables me to approach a myriad of issues in my projects. However, often my projects are within or in a close proximity to the field of glass. I want to welcome modern technology and knowledge into this field while simultaneously respecting the tradition, and acknowledging economical, ecological and cultural concerns. I am trained in traditional glassmaking techniques and see a glassmakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s set of skills as a way of thinking and talking about our society in broader terms, and take advantage of this in my projects. Our world is changing as we breathe new life into this ancient material of glass: the prospects of a future unseen for this magical, multi-faceted material that is reaching beyond its traditional boundaries, responding to our ever-changing surroundings and new challenges, is an immense source of awe for me. These changes, new perspectives and the cultural heritage are my themes, my research issues, and the terrain I operate on. I am a storyteller and aim at showing sections of and occurrences in our society from perspectives that I believe need more attention. Often, I work with glass and film, and usually my films talk about human relationships and emotions through observing the physical world. While many of my projects revolve around fictional narratives, my focus is on actual curiosities and marvels in our culture, and how we treat our environments. Education, research and a pursuit of understanding are central to my enquiry, and whilst the current state of our society saddens me I believe that through addressing various phenomena and being fearless about taking a stand we can aspire to a better tomorrow. This is what I constantly work towards.

Riikka Haapasaari

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I am an artist. I am a filmmaker. I am a writer. However, most of my artistic practice fits in none of these fields as my work grows from a deliberate in- betweenness, uncertainty and rootlessness, and I intentionally work in the space that is around these fields. I believe that by focusing on the unspoken, unconventional and non-traditional points of view it is possible to make work that positively expands all these traditions, and to create new ways of approaching even difficult issues in our society.

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Riikka Haapasaari An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn Hello Riikka and welcome to this special edition of : before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and after having earned your Bachelor of Arts in Ceramics and Glass Design you moved to London to nurture your education with Master of Arts in Ceramics and Glass, that you received from the Royal College of Art: how did these experiences influence your trajectory as an artist? From very early on, already before considering studies in any creative field in the university I had developed a fondness towards cinema and glass, I felt that more than anything these two means of communication spoke to me, and that maybe, maybe there was a way of bringing these two together and eventually develop a way of telling stories that exceeded the vocabulary of both means individually. But there was no straight avenue to learning to work in both fields simultaneously. I felt that I had to choose: either film or glass and reasoned that I should start with glass coming from outside the glass community, growing up in Finland it can be a real challenge to develop skills in

Very early on into my studies in glass it became clear that my approach to this material was not in the curriculum and I had a hard time accepting that. To me, glass was a means of communication, a language that crosses cultural and social boundaries, forever moving, forever transforming, it was a magical material that tapped into the secrets of the universe and beyond - it was everything else but a tangible, immobile object. And this clash of my fantasy world and the reality of glassmaking largely defined my approach to studies in the university. I had amazing tutors and brilliant colleagues and the technical skills I developed in the university are such a resource but I was always searching for another place where someone shared my vision of glass. This drove me to travel around the world, trying to find anything that would ring true to me, in a journey to find at least someone who used the same words as I did - while I am still on this quest (and perhaps will always be), I have been extremely fortunate having met individuals who see glass in a similar way as I do. While in London, I had the privilege of working with a filmmaker who instantly understood what I was talking about and pushed me out of my comfort zone in the most gently way, and during our discussions I felt that I was changed, glass and cinema made more sense than ever and there was still a magical future to work towards. He is no longer with us but the wisdoms he shared are still the backbone of my practice.

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this craft. It is also my firm belief that in order to truly speak with glass, to use the material to its full capacity, these skills and a deep understanding about its cultural heritage, and awareness of the tradition and potential futures are paramount. And for this very reason, studying glass with skilled and aware individuals was a requirement to even begin to understand what glass really is.

Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.riikkahaapasaari.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work. In the meanwhile, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up? My process has changed over the years from approaching projects as individuals to treating my practice as a continuum, endless discovery, development, and learning. I continue to grow as a glassmaker, as a filmmaker, as a person working within the creative fields. For me, it is of utmost importance that the one thing that will never change is the change itself – if I know exactly what is going to happen, it is not worth doing anymore. I continue to accumulate a large body of material and research to fuel my work – there is always so many stories to tell but it also takes me time to find the right words and for this reason I am constantly adding to this “pool of material” where everything relates to everything: mainly it consists of research, visual material, writings, emotions, everything interesting and curious… As time passes, strands of stories start to form in this pool and I begin developing those into actual projects. Some projects take years to complete while others are finished within weeks,

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Thinking back to that time, and now when I have a little bit of perspective, it seems so important crossing paths with encouraging educators and individuals who see the uncanny as a source of new standpoints and are not afraid of nurturing that. Sometimes, all it takes is just a couple soft nudges. Proper education and developing skills in ones craft are crucial but even the fanciest diploma does not measure up to meeting the right people (for you) and having those most challenging discussions. However, this path I have been on since pre-university, the schools, the people and the places have had a tremendous effect on what I am doing these days, I would not change a thing.

I actually follow the traditional script-productionpost tangent and enjoy the structure it brings to my practice as I do everything from script to post on my own – while sometimes my practice is everything else but linear and I might go back from edit to redrafting the script only to rush back to the editing table. As I now work outside of (any) industry and free of most constraints, I know this way of working is such a luxury, and am fully embracing the opportunities this time in my practice has brought. I do not have a studio and for now this supports my practice as I am able to move around freely and set up basically anywhere. However, glassmaking is often tied to a physical space, a workshop, a factory or a studio, and thus this mobile approach I have embraced has sometimes proved difficult in terms of glass but it has not stopped me, the physicality of glass has always been also a challenge but these days it is a very welcome opportunity instead. I do take the advantage of honing my glassmaking skills every time I get to work in a workshop though – learning new about glass is a never-ending process. I carry a simple computer and a camera + mic set-up with me, and often that is enough for my projects – occasionally I do the heavier work in a studio both in production and post but this is very rare. In the past I have also steered away from heavy tech because I felt that it slowed me down and prevented from fully exploring the avenues my practice took me. I do look forward to the day when I have a crew to work with

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so it is very natural for me to work on a volume of stories at the same time: I just finished two new shorts in the last week, am writing six other shorts and am developing a handful of other projects on the side – alongside my more time-consuming work in the “pool of material”.

For this special edition of we have selected , an interesting video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of the is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with : while walking our readers through of , would you shed light to your main sources of inspiration? The myth about glass being liquid still persists. Glass is an amorphous solid but the thicker bottoms in older churchwindows and the like are thicker because of practical reasons: window glass was not manufactured as flat and consistent in thickness in the medieval times as it is today. The window glass does not melt while in place – put it in a glass furnace and it will though. I wanted to take advantage of this belief and developed a story about a little glass wave that aspired to be like its real-world watery counterparts in the oceans but because of its very nature its dreams were doomed from the start. Central starting points for me were the power of imagination, poetry by Hafez, wanderlust in our modern society, the concept of justice. Also, the story about the little wave is directly linked to my older film Pieni Sininen (The Little Blue) from 2016, both films drawing from stained glass tradition and the current state of it. I enjoy approaching issues in our society through storytelling – often in childlike stories, taking advantage of allegory and suggestion – the space between the lines is equally as important as what is directly

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me though - as working in solitude has its limitations and bigger things are possible with a bigger crowd. In the past I felt that my voice was not strong enough to involve other people in my projects but as time goes by this is changing too: I am thrilled about the prospect of having other “glass-y filmmakers” under my wings one day.

said. I draw ideas from everything that I come across. Everything is a potential starting point for a project, everything has the potential of being the most thrilling story. Sometimes it is difficult to see the excitement of taking the trash out or going to the dentist but when you approach these activities as potential adventures, a whole new reality reveals itself. One of my biggest enemies is growing tired of looking, imagining and dreaming in the everyday so I work hard to keep that possibility to its minimum. I present myself with new situations, places and ideas in my daily practice, and over time, these experiences grow into stories that I feel are too valuable to be left untold. However, most of my work stems from very simple realisations and occurrences, just like with the Little Wave: addressing the liquid-like connection between glass and water, and posing myself with a question: what if? What if there was a glass wave that wanted to be like a real wave? The ambience of provides the viewers with an immersive experience and brings the notion of landscape to a new level of significance, evoking an atmosphere that reminds us of the idea of elaborated by French anthropologis Marc Augé. How would you describe in your work? And in particular, how did you select the ? location for For me, the greatest responsibility of an artist is to bring new perspectives to what is around us and create situations where the viewer feels safe to entertain a different point of view. A landscape such as the beach in the Little Wave is already there, a large number of people have already seen it but still an endless number of stories relating to that landscape, perhaps taking place in it is still untold. Landscape, for me, derives its meaning and significance from someone looking at it or existing in it – it is the dialogue with that landscape that is important in

my practice and in the Little Wave: how the landscape or the surroundings of the Little Wave have a direct impact on how it sees its relation to the world, and how painful it is to see these waves that perhaps come from the places it dreams of seeing. There is so much beauty around us, in the landscape and in the potential mindscapes of us. My approach to locations such as the beach is fairly practical, and my projects change and evolve in relation to what is accessible in the terms of production. I was doing a fellowship in Boston, at MassArt at the time when the Little Wave was in production and came across with this gorgeous beach in the Old Harbor. I have made it into a habit of walking and exploring the surroundings I am in and often find locations during these walks – the explorations also have a direct impact on my projects and this beach with its gentle waves, the direction of the sunset, the lack of larger buildings and crowds was ticking every box on my list on a quest for a location that could be in any continent, was versatile in terms of being a shooting location, had a lot of visual perspective to it, and an air of beauty and mystery around it. Everything was in the can in just a matter of hours one evening: the beach proved to be such a solitary place to shoot and the light was just amazing – such a magical place to shoot. , your Despite to clear references to visual vocabulary, has a very ambivalent quality. How do you view playing out within your works? How would you define in your practice? Most of my work is fiction that draws from the real world and actual occurrences around us. I am captivated by the blurred line between the imagined and the real, and a recurring question in my practice is if the imagined could be real, how could the imagined manifest itself in our perceived world? Concepts such as the power of imagination keep reminding me about the limitations of

interview human existence and the wonders still outside of our reach. The real and the imagined exist side by side in my work and could not occur without each other, and it is the dependant relationship between abstraction and representation that enables this: human senses are sensitive to a limited range of our surroundings but the mind has so much more capabilities. In my practice, I feel that this has everything to do with glass and moving image too â&#x20AC;&#x201C; both media can be utterly ethereal and hold the capacity of bending stories beyond our language, and together this power of these traditions is magnified. The pursuit of understanding and education are central to your artistic enquiry, and as you remarked

in the endling lines of your artist's statement, you believe . What could be in your opinion the role of artists in our unstable, everchangin contemporary age? Do you think that art may address people to create a better society? are facilitators of other perspectives â&#x20AC;&#x201C; also for themselves. At a time when groups of people are coming together and voicing out hurtful and ignorant sentiments towards other groups of people this could not be more important. Every opinion has value but enabling people to review and see these opinions in a Artists

safe environment is paramount in creating a better tomorrow and challenging persisting prejudices. When and if the unknown seems scary and it is easier to succumb to old habits, unawareness, and truths of the past generations and deny change, the artists could not have a more rewarding task at hand: to generate a mentally stimulating environment of reflection, learning and growing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; of pleasure and emotion too. Change begins from within, so absolutely, when that one viewer walks away from a screening or an exhibition or a poem or a snippet of creative work, and something inside them has shifted, they have a smile on their face, it is a move towards a better society. I feel that like attracts like, and enabling people to experience beauty and emotion in the midst of what

sometimes seems a disgusting society is certainly one of the greatest joys of working in the arts. We appreciate the way your work balances modern technology and tradition, accomplishing the difficult task of pursuing such coherent equilibrium between apparently opposite aspects. We are sort of convinced that new media will bridge the apparent dichotomy between art and technology, and we dare to say that Art and Technology are going to assimilate each other. What's your point about this? In particular, how is in your opinion technology affecting the consumption of art?

This is exactly one of the driving forces in my practice. Technology is everywhere so it feels naïve to even suspect an issue in here: art does not exist separate of the society. Our society does not function as it does independent of technology; everything evolves and changes as the society and we respond to our inventions and needs. While there has been remarkable technical inventions in the recent years in the field of glass that has remained largely unchanged tradition for centuries, these are still somewhat separate from the daily practice of many glassmakers and artists – I am convinced that this is going to change in the near future as makers and artists understand that these technologies are not in place to replace the human but to free them from restrictions and widen their scope. This is true not only with actual technologies but new media too: for instance glass and moving image in combination, in the field of glass, is still in its youth, and it is the task of the artists already utilizing their knowledge and skills in both fields to show that this is pretty amazing and there is nothing to be scared of – facilitating a safe and rewarding approach to this way of working. Moving image does not take away from the tradition of glass but enables new perspectives to this magical material and gives more tools to the artists interested in it. Instead of being stuck in the past we must look into the future, there is no question about it. Technology will only have an increasingly more important role in the everyday, also in how we consume art: while art that has a physical presence and a tailored way of being observed is still best experienced live, I have no doubts there will be a way of having that very same experience from distance in the future and this will be possible because of advancements in technology. The human mind is capable and the question has been asked, so it is simply a matter of time. Such ordinary issue today as the internet has blown the opportunities across the table, for both artists and consumers of art, so that it seems only natural that there will be ways of experiencing art in ways that we

can barely imagine today. As you have remarked once, your work . Multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced remarked

". Do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? Absolutely. New media and the ease of communicating across time zones, the ease of travel enable seeing and doing so much more than what is in our immediate vicinity. Art is not necessarily precious or financially burdensome to make, there are no requirements on working as an artist… It sounds superficial but really, anyone could be an artist. A good artist is aware and sensitive when it comes to observing and interpreting the world around us though and this is something that can be a challenge to develop even with the most advanced access to new media, tools and resources – I think this is where education steps in and I do advocate for quality education for artists. Sometimes learning is painful but necessary for growth... would one really not do any cherry picking if given a free range in learning by themselves? I think this has everything to do with balance, there must be freedom but discipline too, and new media does not provide solutions for all of this, we still have to sit down at the bench and learn some aspects of a conscious artistic practice through doing. Simultaneously, the education must change and evolve to better cater for the needs of the artist of tomorrow. New media such as moving image and sound are certainly one of these aspects when it comes to more traditional fields such as glass – the glass artists cannot assume that their work is inherently eternal because glass seems to be so, and it is not only the material or technical advancements

Over the years your works have been showcased in a number of occasions and you have participated to several exhibitions, including your recent show , at the Sikka Art Fair, in Dubai. One of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? For me, my work has meaning only when it has an audience. This has everything to do with facilitating opportunities for new perspectives for my audiences. And naturally, I have to tell my stories in a language my audience understands. Unfortunately, when using spoken word, there is often a question of not everyone in the audience speaking English or Finnish or a particular language but as the vast majority of my audiences understands English there has to be a major reason for navigating away from that. I am currently working on a fictional con-language though so this might address some of the challenges of language-specificity. My earliest moving image projects were aimed at the glass field so I would use “glassy” visual language that might be incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with glass as a material – not that these would be gibberish but a viewer with a glass background would get so much more out of seeing one of these films. I have since gravitated away from such a narrow audience. Today, and as with the Little Wave, my work can be read in different “languages”: the same film presents a very different scenario for a glassy-native, a filmmaker, an elderly lady

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but the way the viewer sees the work. Everything is in a constant flux - why would a piece of art be any different?

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Riikka. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I am currently working on a volume of new short films that are going to my upcoming solo shows in 2018. I am very excited about these projects as I am working with animation, utilizing my con-language (I call it as the Glass language) and bridging the material and the immaterial as well as movement and stillness in ways that are completely new to me. I have also grown my scale and reach significantly in terms of narrative and production and am consciously embracing the opportunities heavier tech brings into filmmaking. Moving image especially in the field of glass is my true passion and I am working towards developing new approaches towards exploring the opportunities glass and moving image bring into creative work. Not in the too distant future I have also a major research project and a feature in the works â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I am thrilled to see how far I can push glass-informed moving image and naturally, as I see education as the cornerstone of a well-functioning society and prosperous future of the arts, my work is not done before I have passed my research and knowledge to the next generation.

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and a child. I do not aim at speaking to every single being but take great pleasure and pride in enabling the widest possible viewer-base. Essentially, the majority of my projects do talk about issues related to what it means to be a human being in this world and thus narrowing my audience to a specific group of people seems ridiculous. So yes, absolutely, I do have my audience in mind at every stage of the process of making work and they have a direct influence on how I construct and present my stories, my vocabulary and visual language.

Lynn Dennison Gen Doy Lynn Dennison and Gen Doy are artists who sometimes collaborate but also have their own distinct practices. To put it in very general terms, Doy works with sound, images and live performance, and Dennison with moving image and sound. They are both interested in making works which are research-based, engaging with the natural environment and with locations of historical, cultural and social significance. An example of this type of collaborative practice is their film Greenham Common, which was made with the help of a new collaborations bursary from a-n The Artists’ Information Company. This film attempts to create a kind of sound archaeology of different periods of military activity on the Common through spoken text and songs, while the meditative images convey the present state of what can be seen on the site. To make this work, Doy visited the Common several times with maps and an immensely helpful archaeological survey found online. At first it was very difficult to identify and understand the largely buried traces of the layered past on the Common but gradually she was able to locate and recognise in material reality what was described in the survey and the maps. During this process she made fieldrecordings and also recorded spoken texts and songs onsite, as well as speaking to people she met on the Common. After Doy’s visits they had further discussions about the direction of the work, and Dennison then began filming aspects of this large site. The images suggest that what they see on the surface is only the most recent layer of what is beneath and largely invisible.

Throughout this process they had many conversations discussing what they wanted to convey through the sounds and images of the Common, best known for the peace demonstrations in the 1980s against the use of nuclear missiles which were being stored there in readiness for an attack. They also met to discuss with singer Lucy Legg to get a different artistic perspective on the work in progress, as specified in the bursary award from a-n. Dennison and Doy’s works together depend on conversations, dialogue, and sometimes differences of opinion. They also usually involve physically going together to visit sites to discuss during the making of the works. Further examples of their collaborations include four sound and image pieces they made for the Church of St Peter and St Paul, Caistor, Lincolnshire under the title of When will our Fields be Seen, Our church bells heard? Based on four poems by Lord Tennyson’s brother, Charles, who was a vicar of the parish and a poet, these pieces installed in the Church brought the fields, skies and seas of Lincolnshire right into the heart of the community. Song cycle, a video installation across six screens, documents Doy singing songs written and composed for six different areas of Hampstead Heath in London. Based on an idea suggested by Schubert’s work, Der Leiermann, the songs refer to the difficulties life presents, particularly in the present political climate.

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Lynn Dennison Gen Doy An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant

Hello Lynn and Gen, and welcome to this special edition of Women Cinemakers: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your backgrounds? Are there any experiences that did influence your evolution as filmmakers and creatives? We met one another when we were doing a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art in London, and then we both went on to do an M.A. in Fine Art at the same university. Our backgrounds were slightly different in that Gen was previously a university

lecturer in art history and critical theory, and Lynn had previously trained as an artist at the Slade. So Lynn already had an established practice when we met, and Gen was studying Fine Art at university level for the first time in 2010 after taking early retirement from her job. We both changed our practice quite a lot when we were studying on the same courses, though in slightly different ways. Gen moved from 2D work such as drawing, painting, photography and printmaking to using sound and elements of performance . Lynn had been making sculptural works and then moved towards installation, using video projection and digital film making. www.gendoy.com www.lynndennison.com For this special edition of Women Cinemakers we have selected Greenham Common, an interesting film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your successful attempt to create a layered history of the area is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: while walking our readers through the genesis of Greenham Common, would you tell us what attracted you to this particular subject? And what was your shooting process like?

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

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This project started when Gen applied for a bursary under the scheme “new collaborations” run by a-n the artists’ information company, a British organisation supporting and encouraging contemporary artists. https://www.a-n.co.uk/news Gen proposed working with Lynn and also a professional singer called Lucy Legg, who was to provide an advisory perspective on the ongoing work from someone who was not a visual artist. Gen wanted song and the voice to be an important element of the work, evoking the past uses of the Common. Gen did research on Greenham Common, which is most known for the antinuclear missle protests and the women’s peace camp of the 1980s. It turned out that the Common had a long history of being used for military purposes, either as a place to billet troops awaiting deployment to somewhere else, or as a place to accomodate weapons. It was at one time a US airbase. After two visits alone by Gen to investigate and get a feel for the place, as well as sound-recording onsite, we both made a visit to the Common after discussing how the project was shaping up.Lynn began filming then, responding to the sights and sounds of the Common, which now bears traces of previous histories, but is again used by the public for cycle pathways, dog walking and grazing horses and cows.

Escaping from traditional narrative form, Greenham Common features a non linear and suggestive storytelling: how did you develop the script and the structure of the film? By the way, do you think that your being women provides your artistic research with some special value? The visuals and sounds of the film are evocative rather than descriptive or setting out a linear narrative. It kind of parallels what the experience of going to the Common is. You gradually realise that the traces of histories you can see on the surface of the earth, are like tips of icebergs… there’s much more beneath, and it’s difficult at first to realise the meanings of the traces you can see. Gen read archaeological reports, took maps with her, and visited several times before she began to understand what she was seeing. The first visit she made seemed disappointing because she saw, but she didn’t understand what she was seeing. It was through a combination of bringing the past and the present together that the meanings of the Common emerged....well, some of the meanings...we couldn’t claim to have dealt with everything that happened there! When we visited the site together, we didn't know exactly what the work would be at that point and Lynn wanted to make a thorough documentation of the area to work with. Gen

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

As far as being women is concerned, we feel that our approach to a site that was associated with military activities would perhaps be rather different than a manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s approach might be. Several of the songs sung by Gen in the film were written and/or performed by women originally, eg the one from the period of the Jacobite rebellion, the WW2 song â&#x20AC;&#x153;Coming in on a wing and a prayerâ&#x20AC;? originally sung by Anne Shelton, and the later song associated with womens protest movements on the Common. The power of visual arts in the contemporary age is enormous and as you have remarked once, the images suggest that what we see on the surface is only the most recent layer of what is beneath and largely invisible: are you particularly interested to trigger the viewers' perception as starting point to urge them to elaborate personal interpretations, urging them to capture what is beneath the surface of the images?

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talked about the research she had made as we explored the common, so Lynn had an idea of what the content would be, so in that way, she began to 'hear' the work while she was filming.

A very good question. Yes we are definitely interested in inviting people to engage with sound and images which could make them think not just about what is embodied in the work, but also about their own positions and situations in the present, and how things from the past can have an impact upon viewers and listeners as the past comes into the present in a sensual way, not just by reading about it in a history book. Greenham Common has also drawn from the specifics of the environment and your process usually involve physically going together to visit sites to discuss during the making of the works. How was this film affected by its location? We discuss a lot when we are applying for commissions together and making work together, either by email, meetings in cafes, or meetings onsite. Even when we are making work separately this usually involves us visiting specific places, as the places are pretty much like participants in the works. We are in dialogue with them. The location played its part in the film totally and without it the work would not exist. The site was understood gradually through time and the time it took to visit the site and spend time there, just as the film unfolds through time. So one could say really that the film is about time, place and what can be brought to the surface and what is still invisible to someone whose feet are placed on the earth of the Common.

Your approach accomplishes an insightful combination between sound and images. The sounds were made by “playing” some of the metal structures and other parts of the built environment of the Common. According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. In Greenham Common you seem to go beyond such paradigm: what is the role of sound in your work? And how do you see the relationship between sound and images? We both use sound in our work, though in different ways. Gen uses the voice and song and field recording whereas Lynn uses sound as part of film and projections. There are indeed some interesting critiques of the way that sight has become privileged in experiencing and writing about art and culture. For example there’s the lovely book on experiencing architecture using all the senses by Juhani Pallasmaa The Eyes of the Skin, and the equally thoughtful book by Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film, in which she argues that “watching” a film is an experience that involves the whole body. For Gen, sound is a way to channel the meanings of a site and its histories through a living body (her own) into the present. As you breathe in the air, it passes in and out of you and you taste it and feel it. You are a kind of conduit for the meanings of the site to live again. It sounds a bit mystical probably but there’s an

important act of being present, of witnessing, and of performance involved in making the sound. In Lynn's practice, the narrative (although not linear), is carried predominantly by the images. Her work is observational, and usually based loosely in documentation of place and the human activity there. She knows how she wants a film to look before she thinks about the sound, although conversely, the sound often takes far longer to

edit that the images. So for her it feels as if the visuals are the driver, but if the sound is not navigating, the work will not get there. Conversely, for Gen the locations and the sounds are the drivers, with images in a more secondary role, so we probably complement one another in our collaborative works. For the works we make together there is lots of discussion, often site visits, and sometimes the

images are edited first and then sound is added, and sometimes the other way around. The relationship between the two elements doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t offer a linear narrative but a kind of invitation to engage the senses and reflect. French anthropologist and sociologist Marc AugĂŠ once suggested the idea that modern age creates two separate poles: nature versus science and culture versus society. How would you consider

the role of an artist in such dichotomies that affect our contemporary age? Well these binary oppositions have some truth in them but mainly because they have been socially and historically constructed as antagonistic. Clearly things are more complex. There are many artists who work with science and scientists, and some who still consider that art is a creative pursuit and that science is concerned with tests

and demonstrable facts. There are some fantastic artworks that bring together science, art, history, utopian vision etc which are more than the sum of the individual disciplines they make reference to. For example there is Jeronimo Voss’s installation Eternity through the Stars (2012) which Gen saw at Documenta and this work is so moving and poetic, yet it involves scientific material and was visible in a planetarium in a scientific museum. She found it totally inspiring. http://d13.documenta.de/programs/the-kasselprograms/some-artworks-and-programsinitiated-by-documenta-13-participants/eternitythrough-the-stars/ Then there are the works by Aura Satz , for example the impressive Sound Seam https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/aura -satz-sound-seam The Wellcome museum in London puts on exhibitions which bring together art and science on a regular basis. Science as well as art can deal with past, present and future, so in this general sense, it’s not so different from art. Lynn is at present artist in residence at the University of Birmingham where she is working with research from scientists and geologists whose work investigates how we deal with issues of climate change, such as flooding.In March, as part of this cross disciplinary research, she presented a site specific video installation, Clepsydra, during the University's Art and Science Week, as part of the Land and Water festival.

Doy works with sound, images and live performance, and Dennison with moving image and sound. You sometimes collaborate but also have your own distinct practices: it's no doubt that collaborations as the ones you have established together are today ever growing forces in several fields of artistic production and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields meet and collaborate on a project. Could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, Peter Tabor once stated that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists? We definitely agree that the work we do together is far more than the sum of its two contributory parts. It’s not only the making that is important but also the discussions. Yet over time, we probably get more of a sense of what we think is interesting, worthwhile pursuing, or just won’t work at all, sometimes without this even being spoken about. This doesn’t mean we always agree though. Having a commission is a big help in focussing on what will make a successful outcome. There is one project we did a lot of work on...a kind of song cycle with films for Hampstead Heath in north London, which, largely because it was never funded or offered a

public venue to be installed, has never really been finished. One of the hallmarks of your approach is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your artistic production with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? Well if we understand this correctly, this addresses a desire to communicate with our audience without necessarily spelling everything out. This is quite difficult in some cases. We want to suggest things rather than explain them, but we want people to â&#x20AC;&#x153;getâ&#x20AC;? the drift of what we have been investigating and developing without making things too obvious. Also it is important for us that the viewer finds space within the work for their own recollections, whilst also creating something more precise than an ambience. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Lynn and Gen. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Umstulpen, 2016, Performance with Video Installation. Dawn Nilo

Shortly Gen will be an artist in residence at Kings College London, working with Professor Michael Trapp to create a work entitled Layers and Echoes including a projection by Lynn. This is inspired by the histories and social meanings of a pseudo-Roman plunge pool on the university site. Part of Genâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residency will also involve engagement with students studying classics to see whether contemporary art practices can contribute to an enhanced experience of historical studies. Lynn is working on a video and sound installation, made as a result of her cross disciplinary residency at the University of Birmingham over the past year. It will feature a voice over from Gen. We are also looking for a venue to show our Song Cycle!

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We would like to see our collaborative work evolving with support to enable us to make works in types of locations we havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t yet been able to visit or create installations. This often involves official permissions, invitations to make work, or physically being able to visit sites such as decommissioned lighthouses etc. It is often not easy to get access to the sort of sites we find really interesting, and a huge percentage of our time is spent researching and writing applications to enable us to make more ambitious works. We are always looking for commissions and residencies which will allow us to move forward and try to work with interesting locations.

Jenny E.Balisle Lives and works in Richmond, California

My art investigates diverse cultures and relationships between manmade and natural environments. Fascinated by flight or disorientation and its patterns, I merge together disparate events and experiences to create new narratives. Fall documents the movement of Yosemite Falls. The sounds are from a Native American Art auction in San Francisco. The audio features the sale of an Apache tray and Plateau beaded bags that mimic the patterns of Yosemiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s environment. I question the commercialization and speculative appreciation of objects from Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original residents. With the recent centennial of The Organic Act of 1916 and as remnants become bid and sold on, the National Park enjoyment and protection debate must include its original history.

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Jenny E. Balisle Lives and works in Richmond, California

An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant FALL is a captivating project by multidisciplinary artist Jenny E. Balisle that initiates the audience into an unconventional and heightened visual experience through the exploration of diverse cultures and relationships between manmade and natural environments. One of the most captivating aspects of Balisle's practice is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of identifying how patterns and symbols of influence impact perception: we are pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. : Hello Jenny and welcome to you have a solid formal training and after having earned your B.A. in Art and Communication, you nurtured your education with a M.F.A. from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. How did these experiences along with your current work as a curator and M.F.A. instructor influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

Education is an opportunity not to be taken for granted. It is a gift that allows for the time to study concepts, engage with new perspectives, and develop an artistic framework to vet ideas. Academia provides a safe space to experiment within a structured setting. During my undergraduate studies, I worked full-time to help cover expenses. From the beginning, education became a refugee of guidance and precious commodity. Graduate school fostered creative ideas while preparing for art world realities. As an instructor, it is my responsibility to share these life lessons with a new generation. An artist can accept or reject all ideas produced and conceived via education. Information allows one to critically think within their practice by questioning personal, institutional, and cultural bias. It can be a challenge for schooling to fit the needs of every student. As a result, research and investigation must fill the gaps. An artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s responsibility is to highlight narratives by questioning the structures within society. The profession demands honest exploration. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic view of your work: while walking us through your process, would you like to tell to our readers

something about the evolution of your style? In particular, do you think that there is that connects all your works?

“Style” can be a term used by the art world to place artists into categories for the purpose of commodification. My style or concept grows with new information, research, and experience. It is truly symbolic of life. The world and technology continues to evolve throughout history. My art is sensitive to changing natural and manmade environments. The central idea is to explore how patterns and symbols of influence impact perception. In addition, inevitable time produces evolution. The constant moving variable can’t be stopped or altered. Therefore, I create in the present by eliminating the constraints of one medium or style often prescribed in academic settings. My art records a current moment by utilizing medium choice and freedom. It is honored and welcomed in my art practice. we have For this special edition of selected , an extremely interesting video installation tthat can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful documentation of the movement of Yosemite Falls is the way you have provided the results of your analysis with coherent combination between and . While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you developed the initial idea?

In 2015, I was the artist in residence at the Choctaw and Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge in Brooksville, Mississippi. My grandfather’s mother, Nora Mae Nash, was born in Gillham,

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

Upon returning to San Francisco, I attended a Native American art auction and recorded its sounds. It was disturbing the blatant commercialization and speculative appreciation of objects from America’s original residents. For this reason, I traveled to Yosemite Falls to witness and highlight its fragile beauty standing firm against the winds of greed. FALL documents the movement of Yosemite Falls by mimicking the slow and deliberate erosion of its protections. The auction audio features the sale of an Apache tray and Plateau beaded bag that mimics the patterns of the environment. The idea derived from my family background, residency experience, and the need to safeguard the legacy of the natural world from obnoxious profiteering. provides the viewers with an immersive experience and brings the notion of landscape to a new level of significance, evoking an atmosphere elaborated that reminds us of the idea of by French anthropologist Marc Augé. How would you describe in your work?

Environment is everything. It sets the tone, creates mood, and provides a context for a concept. The static shot of Yosemite Falls asks the viewer to commit to being present. The changing light, movement of water, and time of day start as subtle details but are vitally important to the work’s narrative. The goal is to participate with an environment’s history instead of passive engagement.

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Arkansas and her mother was Choctaw. During the residency, I visited a sacred Choctaw site and was given three arrowheads.

Your work questions the commercialization and speculative appreciation of objects from America’s original residents: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, " ". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Joep van Lieshout's works, could be considered , do you think that could be considered a political work? Moreover, what could be in your opinion the role of artists in our unstable contemporary age?

Yes, FALL can be defined as a political work. At inception, the intention was to share the commercialization of objects from America’s original residents. It’s difficult for me to separate how this could be controversial or partisan. History continues to be rewritten and contorted into alternative realities. Artists must share their unique perspectives in an attempt to preserve truth. An unstable contemporary age with economic and political obstacles can be challenge. However, art is the conscious of society. What is necessary and meaningful results in nominal monetary return. Artists must continue to push forward in an effort to shape a utopia that celebrates diversity and freedom of expression. Creativity draws societal change. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, your main goal is to identify how patterns and symbols of influence impact perception: German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about it? And in particular, how would you consider in your work?

Artists must forge their path to research and discovery. So, I wouldn’t rule out symbolic strategies to assess

meaning to the world we live in. In an art practice, creation can include unique behavior patterns such as manifestos, rituals, and rules that influence output. There must be infinite options to investigate psychological and narrative elements. In essence, everything could be considered a medium. In addition, “everything” has the possibility of symbol interpretation regardless of an artist’s intention. Symbols and patterns are part of a human’s DNA and experience. They are inherent subconsciously and consciously. Artworks will frequently illicit symbol labeling in order to make sense of a concept. Symbols are taught in numerous forms such as language, cultural, social, and religious practices. Identifying Western bias is key to understanding the symbols in my work. In art history, the male gaze objectified women as an object. As a female artist, I objectify patterns, perception, and power. The sound of spoken words plays a crucial role in according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you see the relationship between sound and images?

In FALL, the audio is from a Native American auction in San Francisco. It is a critical conceptual component by mimicking an art exhibit audio guide. If Yosemite and its original residents could talk, what history would be told? The FALL image appears static while the audio records action. The relationship between sound and image switches roles creating a sense of disorientation. The visual and audio are equally important in order to capture and create a new environment or narrative. You are a versatile and your practice ranges from drawings, sculpture and site-specific installations to objects, video and audio: what draws you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? Moreover, you

Film still from A Line through the Periphery, 2014. Digitally transferred and edited Super 8 film by Dawn Nilo

stated once that : when do you recognize that a technique to or a medium has exhausted self?

Inspiration dictates the final form of an artwork. In my art practice, the goal is to match the best medium to an idea. The multidisciplinary approach vets inspiration through identifying, capturing, recording, research, and implementing concepts (ICRRI). Experience shifts this malleable template of creativity. When implementing an idea with a technique or medium, I access if my skill set matches, investigate various mediums, and seek outside assistance. The inspiration may change by accepting a new outcome. That is part of the process. Finding the correct match to a concept requires flexibility. In the end, exhausting an idea becomes a new one. Over the years your works have been showcased in several occasions, including your recent participation to The Nor’Easter: 47th Annual Juried Members Exhibition, at the New Britain Museum of America: one of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create with the viewers, who are provided with of the opportunity to become active participants and are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

Yes and no. It’s a challenge to predict audience reception accurately. As a result, I create without any perceived judgments. It can take time to discover the appropriate venue for an artwork. One part of the world will connect to a concept while another rejects. History, location, society, and politics affect audience reception.

The goal is to create the best work possible and eventually it will find a home. Differences in language can dramatically alter intention and output. For example, my art video PRAY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLPrY9MLy5c) documented the “blood moon” in California and how light scatters off of air molecules creating its intense color. The sounds were from the Lingyin Buddhist temple in Hangzhou, China. Visitors tossed coins on top a small prayer structure for good luck outside of the Hall of Master Ji Gong. The unique Chinese dialect was translated numerous times to English. The transcendent memory became altered and Western bias exposed due to language misinterpretation. Despite cultural and linguistic differences, art is a universal language that can penetrate barriers. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Jenny. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Advocacy is a very important part of my art practice. Locally, I serve on the Public Art Advisory Committee and as a Richmond Arts & Culture Commissioner in California. Recently, the Richmond City Council adopted a One-Percent for Public Art on Private Projects Program Ordinance. The vetting of the program encountered resistance from conservative/libertarian groups opposed to public art. Therefore, I will be helping my community to organize and protect this positive program. Because of new political realities in the United States, future artistic projects include repurposed objects along with video and laser installations reflective of alternative facts. Politicians interested in power by any means has eroded the basic principles of democracy. My future work will focus on the consequences of corrosive policies while highlighting the importance of universal human rights. Past and current events continue to influence my art practice.

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Rachel Gruijters Human memory starts developing within the first two or three years of a child’s life. When Rachel was only one year old a life-changing event occurred. She doesn’t remember. In order to deal with this void, Rachel collects, organizes and reinvents memories, even if it means constructing new ones to fill the emptiness. In her work, Rachel chooses to transcend the limitations of working with one medium, instead opting for a cross-over between photography, film, installation and role playing. The most recent completed body of work covers the artist’s attempts to get to know her mother, to create her own memories, to have an answer to the question: “what was your mother like?”. It’s belated motherdaughter bonding. Currently Gruijters is making her short film ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ (working title). The film revolves around the fact that all sorts of things in life are constructed: from who we seem to be to the homes we inhabit; and from our memories to Classical Hollywood.

Rachel Gruijters

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Rachel Gruijters An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn Hello Rachel and welcome to this special edition of Women Cinemakers: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and you hold a Master of Multimedia Design that you received from the KASK School of Arts, Ghent. How did this experience influence the way you currently conceive your works? Studying Multimedia Design (later renamed to ‘Autonomous Design’) probably influenced me greatly; it is a department that generally houses students that don’t fit into any other department. This is usually because they don’t work with one set medium, or because they value concept over technique. Concept, and developing a personal artistic vision/philosophy, was also the main focus of the department while I was studying there. This is still how I go about conceiving new works; it starts with an idea, a concept that fascinates me. Then I take my time to research this concept; I read, watch films, browse the internet, listen to interviews, talk to

people, sometimes write about it, etc. This researching-phase can take quite a while, probably because I so enjoy doing it. During and after the research (that usually never really stops), I make notes of all possible ideas of how to turn this concept into a work. So, it’s only in the second or third “phase” that I start thinking about what medium to use. You are a versatile artist, capable of crossing from a medium to another: how do you select the medium to express the idea that you explore? In particular, when do you recognize that one of the mediums has exhausted its expressive potential to self and why did you move to filmmaking? First of all thank you for thinking I’m capable of crossing mediums, since it is something that doesn’t always feel like an obvious thing to do. It wasn’t a very conscious choice to move to filmmaking, I’m actually still rather awkward when I’m referred to as a filmmaker, because I feel I haven’t any right to be called that, since I didn’t have any training in the field, nor have I already have a lot of experience. I go about making films (or filmic work) as I would with any other work I create; I have a concept that — turns out— I think would work best as a film. Or it gradually evolves into a film, taking me by surprise.

Since I, technically, don’t know all that much about film, I like to surround myself with a team that does. Although, that wasn’t very much the case for Do Not Forget. Do Not Forget was actually the first real film I ever made, and I did it without a team (but not without help, mind you). It is just the result of what happened after a lot of playing around with the material I had collected. As for recognizing when a material has exhausted itself: I don’t think any material will ever exhaust itself. It might not be the right material for a particular work I want to make, but then I just shelve it for a little while, until another work comes along that would fit perfectly with that particular material, and off the shelve it comes. For this special edition of Women Cinemakers we have selected Do Not Forget, an interesting film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your inquiry into the notion of memory is the way you provided its results with autonomous aesthetics. When walking us through the genesis of this stimulating film would you tell us something about your process and set up? it usually goes, in the beginning there was the idea (I feel like I repeat this in every answer I give, but I can’t really go around it). I had had the idea for a while, but never came across teachers that I trusted enough to be my tutor, until my last year of my bachelor’s degree, when I met (or got to know better) two women who could hold their own, that I felt I could trust. It can take some time for me to trust a person enough to share my thoughts and doubts with, and as I didn’t have that much time, it was important for me there was already some trust. So, I had a safety net to develop Do Not Forget, and take the time for it. As

I started to simultaneously research my mother as a person, as well as the mother as a concept, theories about memory, Snow White and “hidden mothers” (a phenomenon in Victorian photography). This list of seemingly random topics came together in my thesis. To research my mother I looked at photographs and talked to people I was close to, that were also close to my mother, asking them what they remembered of her. The voices you hear in the film are actually my “kind-ofmothers”; people that collectively did a swell job at raising me instead of my mother. The word quickly spread, and more and more people got involved. People I had never even met before, sending me emails saying they had found photos of my mother, but also within my own family. Aunts and uncles started looking again for things that were hidden away in the attic. That’s how we found a few small home video fragments. So, in my early 20s, I saw my mother move for the first time (disregarding the 1½ years that I can’t remember). After acquiring all of this material, the moment came to ask myself: “Now what do I do with all of this?” So I laid everything out and discussed it with my tutors. I had collected photos, home videos, audio recordings, objects, handwritten letters/notes and anecdotes. Film seemed the most appropriate medium to merge all the paraphernalia into one thing.

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In the film I try to construct a memory of my mother, who died when I was 1½ years old, leaving me without memories of her that I’m aware of. Once again; at this point I had no clue I was making a film.

Then the playing started. I got myself Final Cut Pro, and started teaching myself. Do Not Forget really is the outcome of a lot of trial and error. But I think for this film it actually worked to my advantage that I was such a rookie, for it made that I wasn’t too focused on, and taken aback by technicalities. The studio with most of the acquired material spread out. Do Not Forget is rich with archival images pervaded with symbolic references: how much importance have symbols in your practice? My first reaction was to say that I don’t use symbols that often, but come to think of it, I do. So, thank you for the revelation. I think I use symbols because they are a common good. We can all read them. We have appreciated the way you have combined moving images, statics and written words into coherent unity: did you pursue such result instinctively or did you methodically structure the process? In particular, do you like spontaneity? First of all: I do like spontaneity, but I like structure too. This results in me usually trying to structure or methodize my instincts, but I will always put a gut feeling before a rational thought, even though I value ratio greatly. For Do Not Forget, for example, there was this chaos of all these different collected things and not knowing where it was leading to or where it would end. It was like The Great Unknown, or like falling down the rabbit hole, whatever you want to call it. To cope with those uncertainties I tried to order whatever I could. I would categorize my external hard disk in this web of folders, or I would divide the collected snapshots in categories (i.e. “me & mother”, “dressing up”, etc.), wrap them in silk paper and label them with post its, and then put those little packages in the “snapshot box”. People have more than once made fun of me because of this —

You can see this need for structure in the film; you see the silk paper-wrapped snapshots, you see me zooming in to- and analyzing small details. I think you can see me wonder. Trying to find out if it’s true that our teeth look the same, comparing our faces for similarities, for the first time making an effort to find out for myself whether we looked alike, something that more and more people had begun to tell me. The final structure of the film happened quite intuitively. The order things are in just felt right to me, as if a story was slowly unfolding and more and more input was slowly building up to a point of being oversaturated. I guess I instinctively followed the road I travelled while making the film. Sound plays an important role in Do Not Forget: according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear: how do you see the relationship between sound and images? In all honesty I can hardly say I know anything about sound, but I do find it incredibly important. I can not put sound into words, meaning I do not know how to use words to express what kind of sounds I think should go with the images. I can say when it doesn’t sound right to me, which can make it pretty difficult to work with me, I suppose. Sound can really create a world of its own. That world can either fit into the visual world, or it can be

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I’d almost call it a fetish— for order, but it helped me get a grip on things and stay somewhat sane.

contrasting worlds, which can also result in something very interesting. Best-case scenario a film will still be compelling with your eyes shut. I’m always quite intrigued by, and in awe of, visually impaired people: all of the information they can filter out of sounds that most of us who can see usually don’t even pay attention to. Sometimes I try to just sit somewhere for a little while, closing my eyes and becoming aware of the sounds. I guess it’s a way of training myself to become better at understanding sound. As you have remarked once memories aren’t the truth. They are just one person’s truth, as is your film: how do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works? In particular, do you think that there's a dichotomy between these notions or there could even be a liminal area in which constructed memory and reality find an unexpected point of convergence? I love playing with the real and the imaginary. It makes me chuckle a great deal of the time. As a kid I was mesmerized by Peter Pan; the book and pretty much all of the film adaptations I could get my hand on. As a teenager, I was still mesmerized by this magical world of not growing up and what it actually meant to grow up. Even now, I still have a soft spot for Peter Pan, for all of the reasons mentioned and because of it acknowledging that imagination and belief are such powerful forces. Something becomes real (at least for one person) the moment that someone believes it to be real, doesn’t matter how constructed it is. You can be sure that reality

is a whole lot more fictionalized than you’d think. Our brain can play funny tricks with us. It must be a terribly fine line between fiction and non-fiction, if such a line exists at all. The theme of memory is quite recurrent in history and theory of cinema. Do Not Forget reveals this root, which were both practical and theoretical. A particular aspect of your cinema we would like to focus on is the way you explore the boundaries between personal and collective memory. Do you think that there is a point of convergence between these apparently separate spheres? I think all personal memory is more collective than we think or than we would like to think. I mean; collective memory is made up of a lot of personal memories. Even though we don’t share the exact same memories, we can usually relate to other people’s memories in a way. That goes for Do Not Forget too. For people who have known me and my mother, they are looking at Rachel and Sandra and thinking about their own memories of us. But I’ve found out others find a way to relate to the film as well. Some of us are mothers; some of us are mothers of daughters. Some of us are daughters and we all have mothers, one way or another. So I think you can very easily substitute “Sandra and Rachel” for “mother and daughter” or “mother and child”, and everyone will understand. There’s a reason “mother and child” are such an iconic symbol in Christianity, and with that in Western cultures. That is what I mean when I say that we can all relate to other people’s personal memories, because it can always be brought back to very basic, or early, concepts. We want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades

there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? It’s a complex thing, this gender issue, and I often avoid talking about it, since I don’t think I can eloquently put into words what I think about it, usually making me sound way harsher than I intend to. A lot of women I surround myself with are somewhere between a feminist-activist and somewhat post-feministactivist stage, and so am I. In theory, I think gender shouldn’t matter and whatever a man can do, a woman can do, and there’s no need to stress this fact, for it’s obvious. Or so I think. And so it should be, I think. Unfortunately, there are moments when I’m confronted with the fact that this is not how everyone thinks. Or that, apparently, it isn’t as obvious as I thought it was. As a result, I have found myself using Instagram hashtags like #femaleartist, to give you a very banal example. So, even though I think we should have passed this by now, I realize more and more that we have not, and that it might be getting worse. Not necessarily in the art- or film industry (although we haven’t reached equity yet), but in life in general. I’d like to think that me being me provides my artistic research with some special value. Of course, my identity is colored by my gender, but by so much more than that. There are millions of women in this world that I do not look like. There are probably also millions of men in this world that I have more in common with than with some women.

What I’m trying to say is; I hope we reach the point of equity soon, or of focusing on everyone as individuals, not trying to divide everyone in groups labeled by gender, and generalizing those groups. Until we do, I’ll try to play the game. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Rachel. We wish you all the best with your filmmaker career! What's next for you? Well, thank you very much for your questions, and moreover for your interest. Currently I am making a second film, something I, after completing Do Not Forget, said I “most likely wouldn’t do”. Oh, the curveballs life can throw at us! We, this time I am surrounded by a great team, have just finished shooting the picture beginning of July and now I have slowly started editing and thinking about the audio. To get back to your question about audio; it plays a big role in this film as well. In short, the film will be about constructions. Construction of homes, construction of memories and that linked to the construction of the domestic in Classical Hollywood and the Hollywood System in general, and the malleability of all of this. So, the film is highly constructed itself. The images are highly stylized, and the audio will in its entirety be created afterwards, hopefully creating that audial world I was talking about. So, I’m currently writing a script for the audio, which makes me laugh at myself, because it seems like a rather silly thing to do. Especially for someone who cannot put sounds into word. The title we currently use to refer to the film is Fake It Till You Make It, which probably says it all. The plan is to have the film finished by mid-October, and then we’ll go from there.

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Kathi Schulz An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant

Hello Kathi and welcome to this special edition of Women Cinemakers: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? Please tell us about your trajectory as a video maker: what did inspire you to express yourself in this medium? As long as I can remember I was always painting and writing. When I started studying and got more serious about making art I quickly noticed that both of these mediums had certain boundaries. Even when I tried to push it to the very limit I was unable overcome these lines. There were certain things that I could not to express by purely painting or writing. I was not able articulate myself fully. Before I even managed to figure out what kept me from doing so I started filming. I felt this strong urge to capture a moving image. The possibility to entrap the smallest motion for ever seemed so tempting, it was impossible to resist.

Filming was a new way of communicating for me. I immediately knew that it was giving my work a profoundness which I was not able to reach beforehand. It also helped me to see and understand what I was interested in and what my work was all about. Sometimes I feel the same way about filming, there is a restriction to this medium for me, too. So I switch back to painting. Mostly both is happening simultaneously. I tend to choose the medium intuitively depending on what I want to express or communicate, even though a lot of times I am not able to exactly define it when I start. Moreover I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t consider it as necessary. I do not see my paintings and my films separately from each other as one strongly influences the other. Seemingly this correlation is really important for my work. For this special edition of Women Cinemakers we have selected Sequence One, an interesting video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your inquiry into the impossibility to express

The basis for all my movies is a text. Sometimes I have to interrupt what I am doing and write everything down that comes to my mind. Mostly it happens when I find myself in a very particular state of mind. Afterwards when I feel settled again, I start working with it. At this point it is purely about language, filming is not relevant yet. Everything is very vague. I try to create a flow, change words around and play with their meanings. This time I recorded my voice beforehand because I wanted to create a stronger relationship between the moving image and the spoken word. I filmed Sequence One in my bedroom because I felt that I needed as much intimacy between the camera and myself as possible. Usually I have a rough concept I start off with, this time the idea was to do a close-up of my skin. I was interested in the frail structure of it, which seems almost abstract. Our skin depicts a membrane which stands between our insides, our thoughts and the outside world. It is so impermeable and at the same time thin and fragile like you could just poke through it without any effort and get to the very core. I listened to my own recorded voice and played around with the camera but as soon as I turned it on it became very intuitive and organic. The original idea which was more a sketch than an elaborated concept changed. There was a really strange intimacy in the room and the presence of the

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your inner self is the way you provided its results with with autonomous aesthetics. When walking us through the genesis of this stimulating project would you tell us something about your process and set up? In particular, how did you develope the initial idea?

was your state of mind when you created Sequence One? What

Sequence One is different from the rest of my films as it also attempts to describe what urges me to make art. As I already mentioned to be able to write I need to be in a very specific state, which sometimes overcomes me. Strangely when it happens I am not able to pin down the source of it. It just sometimes happens for no apparent reason. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a very intense feeling of isolation. Not in the meaning of feeling excluded though. It is the realization of the fact that we are completely by ourselves and the lack of our ability to transfer and communicate this feeling to anyone. This evokes an overwhelming feeling of disconnection. Eventually it turns into a sadness that goes so deep it almost feels shallow. An all embracing emptiness or vacuum and yet everything feels so heavy that it is hard to comprehend. Experiencing the guilt for an act we did not commit and therefore cannot compensate for it.

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camera became really heavy. It changed from being just an object into being something I could actively work with. So the concept was more or less developed while I was filming. Also I have to mention that it was less romantic than it sounds. Of course I had to do several takes. So I was kneeling naked in front of the camera in my very small room and after the first take I had to put bin bags on the floor because everything was already covered in salvia. Besides (I think it took me three takes) after a while it became really challenging to keep drooling.

Sequence One is rich with symbolic references: how much importance have symbols in your practice? In particular, why did you choose blue as color? I tend to see my videos more like moving paintings. So I try to work very intuitively like I do when I paint. Obviously it is a bit more complicated because filming requires more planning. In the first take I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use any paint but when I watched it I knew there was something missing. And it was blue. It is no different from painting, like stepping back and looking at the canvas you just feel what you have to do next, which color or shape is missing. Sometimes this process takes a while and sometimes you despair of it. But I learned that I make the best decisions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; also speaking generally about life - when I trust my instinct no matter how subtle it is. After adding the blue paint I felt much more comfortable with it. Blue (and pink) are very vulnerable colors. Blue always feels deep and unrestricted to me, in case that makes sense, also sort of repetitive in a way which might have been the reason why I subconsciously picked it. The problem I am talking about the disability to express ourselves by using language is one which constantly haunts me. It is impossible to come to peace with it as I will always feel confined by language.

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I am sure everyone experiences this feeling once in a while. Whenever I find myself in this state â&#x20AC;&#x201C; my body and mind are just lingering somewhere in space detached from what we assume to be reality - I start writing everything down that comes to my mind. Materializing my thoughts and giving them a space where they can exist visually outside of my mind and body, is a sort of redemption. It is the only way to get back to reality and feel connected to everything and everyone around me.

I think there is an inseparable bond between both of them. They play an important role in perceiving our environment. The synergy of sound and moving image is essential for my work. Using only one of them would lead into abstraction. McLuhan classifies into hot and cool media which I think is an interesting concept. Hot media focuses on only one sense, but provides the viewer with a lot of information and details. Whereas cool media focuses on more than one sense but does not give a lot of information away, so the viewer is forced to actively engage, a greater effort has to be made in order to understand or follow the presented content. Cool media is supposed to make the viewer more self-initiative as it is multisensory whereas hot media is said to hypnotize the viewer. Both seem like very appealing qualities to me. By creating a certain rhythm between sound and the moving image and sustaining both of them with equal intensity I am trying to create a moment where you feel physically and actively engaged but also finding yourself in an almost narcotic stage. A rhythm that

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Sound plays an important role in Sequence One and the subtle whispers create a consisten unity with the slow movements of the body. According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear: how do you see the relationship between sound and moving images?

Moreover it is basically impossible for the viewer to focus on sound and the moving image at the same time. This very brief moment where the focus shifts from one to another is what I am very interested in. It is like deliberately putting someone in a stage between unconsciousness and consciousness. This very fine line where you are drifting from one stage into another mostly unnoticed. A stage that is caused by the tension between being attentive and then again drifting off into a moment of abstraction. I find this very essential. It is also connected to how we perceive our surroundings and reality. I am interested in this very brief moment we experience when we wake up from a dream. Shifting back from one reality into another, disorientated and not being able to tell the â&#x20AC;&#x153;real â&#x20AC;&#x153;reality apart from your dream. I think of dreams as a very intimate personal reality. Waking up from a dream and a certain sadness or happiness is still lingering around you which is then transferred from your dream into our world demonstrates that dreaming is just a different but also equally existing reality which are not separable from each other. Just as time and space. We daresay that a crucial aspect of Sequence One is the exploration of the nature of the disconnect between the Self and the Other. Paradoxically, it seems that in our ever changing contemporary age everyone appears to be more isolated despite being more connected. How do you consider the issue of the perception of the self in relation to the augmented experience provided by new media? Do

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might slow your breathing down or even change your heartbeat.

I honestly think the disconnection between ourselves and fellow human beings has always been an issue. But in our age this has become more obvious. The media especially social networks and instant messaging and with that the constantly increasing flood of pictures we are exposed to has a huge impact on our way of communication. Images are used as a replacement of language, which is not necessary a bad thing. We are connected on a visual level which is not depending on our location. This might make us think that we should feel more connected to each other because it provides us with the possibility to communicate with anyone and anywhere. We tend to forget that language and physical closeness are very important for connecting which each other. Withdrawing yourself from this way of communicating and filling this void with what the media provides us with is very dangerous. It makes us forget that spoken words and feeling the physically presence of someone like experiencing things that we might not be aware of but are extremely important for building an understanding of each other. Things like sensing someones body heat and maybe even being able to experience the vibration of sound waves of the words they form. We constantly consume, media and also material things. We do not notice that by â&#x20AC;&#x153;enriching â&#x20AC;&#x153;ourselves

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you hope that your art can make people more aware of this situation and then collectively try to change it?

I am not an opponent of the new media or technology at all. It can be a very useful and inspiring tool. We just have to learn how to deal with it reflectively. Details are extremely important in your works and they emerge when viewer comes closer: this might suggest that your art urges the viewers to a deep introspection, regarding both perceptual reality and our inner selves. Do you aim to address the viewers to psychological experience capable of challenging their perceptual parameters? In particular, does it matter to you that your audience totally understand your work? Or do you rather prefer to leave your work open to personal interpretation? first I have to say as long as someone feels touched or inspired by my work I am happy and it does not matter if they might find a different interpretation to it. At

But I keep asking myself the same question as my work depicts such a huge level of intimacy. Sometimes I am in doubt about if I even want to open up that much to the viewer. My style of working forces me to strip naked completely in front of the viewer if he/she embarks on it. So if someone understands my work I am completely revealed. I deliberately put myself in the most vulnerable position I could ever be in which is a very scary and at the same time exciting thought. It is exactly what I am longing for, a seamless understanding of each other that reaches beyond the capability of language, which points out its borders to us with every single word we speak.

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with random stuff we actually dematerialize our lives because we are bypassing the actual material.

This is exactly why art is and always has played such an important role in our society. I feel torn apart by language as it is so ambiguous to me. Language exposes a huge void between us while providing us with seemingly endless possibilities to articulate ourselves. The only way to compensate for this painful lack of understanding is art. So even if Sequence One in particular has a very clear message it is not just about that. I am trying to evoke a feeling, translating it into language and also playing with the whole painful dimension of the spoken word. So I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really mind if the viewer does not understand everything I am talking about. I am playing with this tension. The shifts which occur, the vagueness and a feeling which is hard to grasp let alone to describe. I want point out the boundaries of language, the void it presents in our system of communication, but to do so I am also using it and push it as far as I can.

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A feeling that is transferred even if it is just for a very short moment in which the viewer is experiencing the same state of mind I am in, is imprisoned in the same atmosphere like I am. In contrast to this I am using language to artificially create this stage which seems to be the most relatable and direct tool we have to connect with each other. At the same time I am trying to evoke a vague feeling to put the viewer in a state of mind where the spoken word becomes irrelevant. It demonstrates that nonverbal communication can be so overwhelming even though it is less comprehensible than language. People tend to think it is very subtle but also so overpowering at some points that it literally makes us speechless.

We want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? I think that anyone who feels the urge to pick up a camera or more generally speaking feels the urge to create something and does so contributes certain qualities which are unique and irreplaceable. I don’t think the quality or intensity of what you create is depending on your gender. But there definitely have been a lot of women artist who went by unappreciated in the past which was presumably the case because they were women. It is very important that there is an equality of opportunities for men and woman and that their achievements and creations receive the same appreciation. We are very lucky to live in a time where this is changing and a lot of attention is payed to create this equality. But especially art should be one step ahead of this. Art should demonstrate that it does not matter what or who you are and where you come from because in the moment we start creating all of this becomes irrelevant. Values that matter and confinements that restrict us in the world resolve as soon as we make art. Not only for the one who creates but also for the one who observes it. In the very moment we perceive art everything else becomes meaningless.

Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Kathi. We wish you all the best with your filmmaker career! What's next for you? There are a lot of aspects which I would like to keep working on or intensity in my video work. In Sequence One and “Bedrängtes Herz” (a video I worked on previously) I did almost no editing. Both of them consist of only a single take. Using a one take technique feels more direct and in a way cleaner to me. In “Bedrängtes Herz” I created a moving pattern which overlies the main image. This pattern seems like an animated after effect, even though I created it using simply water and light (which made it a very tricky setup). I would like to experiment with more techniques which head in that direction. For my next project I might want to combine one of those effects with some of the constantly changing focus of the camera and the closeness of my own body to the camera. I am very excited as filming is such a broad field and offers endless possibilities. There is so much more to discover, play with and to learn. It is important to me that I am able to grow with my work. I never want to stop learning because for me it would equates with stagnation. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this interview.

An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant

Yidan Xie Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Text: the text in this animation is hard to read because the font is extremely difficult to decipher. Through those strange texts, I try to discover the inverse relationship between the image and text. Actually, according to the moving image, the rough and broad meaning seems like could be understood. Probably the viewers are able to "read" the new symbol, text, and language under the hint of the image. It is feeling that “I don’t know what the text's meaning, but I feel like I can understand”. So please do NOT try to read the text, just feel it :) Black space: The idea of leaving black space comes form the “white space”, a special concept in the Eastern painting. The eastern artists believe that the white space left consciously will provide the huge space of imagination. so I adopt this concept in my animation and use the sound to fill in those black space without the image. Meanwhile, I draw the unique background with the different visual aesthetic for each creature for distinguishing the front and back, which generates another space layer. Sound: Sound is a very important element in this animation. It is not only the background music but also a narrative tool to filling the black space as the angle of hearing. For example, when the clouds gather, the viewer can hear the sound of thunder and rain, but the corresponding image does not appear in the visual part. I think the sound does not always cater to the image, it also can develop the space and narrative independently, which the image will not be shown. Mythical Creatures: After reading, I summary the method of mythical creatures construction and utilize this method to create and draw my own mythical beasts. If you are interested in the method of mythical creatures construction, you can review my thesis paper: http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5735&context=etd. In this paper, I write some basic idea which is easy to grasp for the artist who loves creating mythical creatures.

Yidan Xie

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My latest project is an independent and experimental animation named “The Classic of Mountains and Seas”. The inspiration comes from the Chinese ancient book “The Classic of Mountains and Seas", a compilation of mythic geography and myth. This work is very different with most of the animation, I try and discover many new forms basing on the interesting concept of Eastern Painting into this animation.

Yidan Xie An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn With captivating imagery and inventiveness, The Classic of Mountains and Seas is a subversive mix of surreal atmospheres and audacious storytelling. Focusing on an effective combination between imagery belonging to mythical creatures from Chinese ancient tradition, Yidan Xie creates an exquisitely dystopic film reminescent of Yuriy Norshteyn's work. With its insightful narrative twists and accurate cinematography, The Classic of Mountains and Seas is capable of transposing the narrative form of a book into the realm of moving images. We are pleased to present Yidan Xie for this year's WomenCInemakers. Yidan, please tell us about your trajectory as a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium? The Classic of Mountains and Seas is an independent and experimental animation. This work is very different with most of the animation, I try and discover many new forms basing on the interesting concept, such as “black space”,“wired text”, “narrative sound” and “construction of

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Text: the text in this animation is hard to read because the font is extremely difficult to decipher. Through those strange texts, I try to discover the inverse relationship between the image and text. Actually, according to the moving image, the rough and broad meaning seems like could be understood. Probably the viewers are able to "read" the new symbol, text, and language under the hint of the image. It is feeling that “I don’t know what the text's meaning, but I feel like I can understand”. So please do NOT try to read the text, just feel it :) Black space: The idea of leaving black space comes form the “white space”, a special concept in the Eastern painting. The eastern artists believe that the white space left consciously will provide the huge space of imagination. so I adopt this concept in my animation and use the sound to fill in those black space without the image. Meanwhile, I draw the unique background with the different visual aesthetic for each creature for distinguishing the front and back, which generates another space layer. We would address our readers to visit http://cargocollective.com/yidanxie to get a wider idea about your artistic production, that ranges from filmmaking to animation, from illustration and sound design, revealing that you are a versatile artist capable of crossing from a medium to another: what drew to such multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a particular media to express the idea of a project? Actually, I would not like to limit the preference of medium, I try my best to reach out new medium and

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mythical creatures” into this animation. This animation is not very dynamic, it looks like a moving imaging even moving illustration work, under those peaceful movements, a fantastic and mysterious world is showed gradually.

For this special edition of Women Cinemakers we have selected The Classic of Mountains and Seas , an interesting project that our readers have already started to admire in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of this work is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: what drew you to inquire into mythical creatures and landscape of ancient Chinese tradition? As a mentioned, the inspiration of The Classic of Mountains and Seas comes from the Chinese ancient book with the same name. In this book, a huge number of mythical creates and fantastic landscape are described carefully. After reading, I summary the method of mythical creatures construction and utilize this method to create and draw my own mythical beasts. If you are interested in the method of mythical creatures construction, you can review my thesis paper: http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti cle=5735&context=etd. In this paper, I write some

basic idea which is easy to grasp for the artist who loves creating mythical creatures. Meanwhile, according to those mystical creatures, the fantastic landscape like "solar smelter","ice peak" and " peach blossom valley" are also drawn to strengthen the narrative of mythical creatures. Reminding us of Yuriy Norshteyn's work, your artistic production in the field of animation is

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combine them to create the more diversified presentation. When I do the art, at the beginning I will not consider the technical problem and just focus on my concept. I have been keeping learning the technique because it not only can make me freer when I create but also can develop my thinking about art medium.

For visual experience, the ancient Chinese and Japanese watercolor works affected me a lot. I prefer to use bright and vintage color to create the gorgeous image. For symbolic approach often utilized in my artwork, Gustav Klimt, he definitely is my favorite artist. He was an Austrian symbolist painter. My work is affected by his work very much. Colorful, mysterious, fantastic and symbolic, those keywords are often described his work. I am so infatuated to the visual representation, therefore, the similar feeling is also showed in my work. Although my works have strong Eastern aesthetics visually, which is hard to connect with the European painting in the 18 century, the Gustav Klimtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work indeed give me inspiration in the mental impression. Innisfree is rich with symbolic elements converge together to create a surrealist narrative: how much importance have symbols in your practice? Symbolic approach probably is my commonly used method. In most of the time, I would not like to describe some scene point for point, space is always described and developed through just a leaf or a flower interspersing on a large area of black space, which arouses the immigration of viewers. For Innisfree, Innisfree is a work which combines with the video and animation. In this work, I try to discuss a new representation from of space. It is different with the laying animation we often watch: one layer is for

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marked out with a personal style: who are, if any, some of your chief influences from contemporary scene?

The Inspiration of Innisfree comes from W. B. Yeats poem“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. In this poem, the writer describes a beautiful island named Innisfree. In my opinion，innisfree is not only a beautiful island but also a symbol of the perfect word in poet's mind, in other words, this poem is a symbol in itself. Therefore I also named my work “Innisfree” that means I would like to use various medium to represent my Innisfree Island which is full of fantastic scenes and creatures in my mind. Sound plays an important role in your works: according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western

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the background, one layer is for the character and one layer is for other objects, all of those images will fill in the display space like electronic screen with different size. But in my work, I create many circle spaces, according to the content the images show in the circle spaces, that spaces, sometimes, connect each other but sometimes they are alienated, those dynamic relationships will be shown by the moving of mythical creatures.

Sound is a very important element in this animation. It is not only the background music but also a narrative tool to filling the black space as the angle of hearing. For example, when the clouds gather, the viewer can hear the sound of thunder and rain, but the corresponding image does not appear in the visual part. I think the sound does not always cater to the image, it also can develop the space and narrative independently, which the image will not be shown. I did several sound work to archive this idea. For example, Luanyang summer note is a sound collection work, this work has 4 sound story: Fox, Ghost Whisper, Ghost Poem and Ghost Dancing. Luanyang Summer Note is also a Chinese ancient story book, it describes many interesting stories between human and ghost. Because the writer finishes this book in summer in the Luanyang City, so this book is named "luanyang summer note". Through reading, I grab 4 stories I am interested in, and use sound, a special medium, to represent the story described by text originally. In those sound work, I try to discover the possibility of sound narrative, that means sound can be an independently narrative language and develop the space and push the story instead of being a tool which caters to the image merely. Despite to clear references to perceptual reality, your visual vocabulary has a very ambivalent quality. How do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works? How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice?

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societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear: how do you see the relationship between sound and images?

Sir Lanka features a brilliant storytelling, using an original narrative structure and reveals a very personal vision of cinematic space and time that glides seamlessly between reality and dystopia. How did you develop the script and the structure of the film? Can you tell us something about the shooting process? This movie recorded several emotional experiences of a gay boy who was struggling with himself to admit his sexual orientation. He dreamed Sri Lanka as a place he could go, however, Sri Lanka isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a country but a utopia world. The â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sri Lankaâ&#x20AC;? is said to be the safe island for the gay boy where he would tell us his paradox of sex, life and reality. Shooting process has 2 part, inner shooting and outside shooting. Inner shooting is in the photo studio, and outside shooting is on the street with much Chinese traditional architecture. In this video, I used many symbolic scenes like rubbing hands, arranging flower and touching the plaster of the nude, which are the emotional expression shot. Actually, the actor indeed falls in the confused emotion towards the sex. What were some of your aesthetic decisions? In term of aesthetic decisions, my personal style prefers the eastern aesthetic which is relative to it relative to my environment and culture I grow up. For visual, I love the implicit and subtle presentation form. For structure and form, West art like painting, video, and the film also inspired me a lot.

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I think abstraction and representation are 2 poles on the line. If we consider the abstraction and representation of artwork, it could be placed on any spot on this line. For me, I try to put my artwork in the middle of the line so that my artwork can keeps the balance between abstraction and representation.

I think women play an important role in art creation, there are many excellent female artists like filmmaker or illustrator surrounding me. Although the power of women is rising sharply, in some country or some traditional area, many women artist have to stop their art career because of society and public opinion pressure. hope I could be an outstanding woman artist and set a good example to encourage more women who have the artistic talent to devote themselves to art creation. Thanks for your time and thought, Yidan. We wish you all the best with your filmmaker career! What's next for Yidan Xie? I will continue to devote myself to create and push my thinking which is discussed and research all the time in the field of art. Besides the personal creation, I hope I can join the project with the big theme of ecology, peace, policy or human. I hope as an artist I can do something which is good for the world we are living. If I have the chance, I will cooperate with other artist or organization to do a project about the animal. I hope this project could be present the concept of Animism as a more interesting and acceptable art form like the video game or VR game to reminder people to be kind to the other life on the world.

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interview Yidan Xie I am Yidan Xie, a young multimedia artist from China, Now, I am living in United State. As a multimedia artist, I mainly focus on Dynamic Imaging. My works are various including video, animation, illustration, Sound, and Visual Design. In my works, a mysterious and fantastic visual experience is presented. I have been discovered the new art presentation of space narrative and explores the relationship among the women, nature, and mythology. Portfolio Link: http://cargocollective.com/yidanxie

Lives and works in The Hague, The Netherlands

In my work I focus on the formability of life itself. The idea that everything is possible, as long as you create or imagine it yourself, leads to an ambiguous reality. The reality I believe as real. On the one hand it will give you total power, but on the other it exaggerates the futility of existence. With this existentialist fascination I investigate the borders between real and unreal. In my work I express this belief with an artificial and performative nature. I challenge the normative capitalist ways of thinking, where progress, (suppressed) optimism and success are leading fundamentals in dealing with the absurd: realism, bittersweetness and paradox. I am inspired by certain sub-worlds with their own created rules. For example, subcultures like skins and punks, but also mental institutions or offices. I am also inspired by the construction of identity, like masks, idols, rebels, lunatics, dictators, and the changeable positions of individuals in society. My own body is always the basis for my characters, both for lens based media and for sculptures through casting. During live

performances I sometimes work together with (an) assistant(s). Using my own body for different characters I am doomed to fail the credibility, but that part is subservient to the ability to express the formability. On the outer layers I use materials such as hair, makeup and textile which function as suggestive and identifying body masks that cover borders between object and subject, gender, natural and artificial, reality and fantasy. I want to create a world built on broken dreams, deep desires and false truths for a group of distinct people inspired by observations and imagination. The medium is mutable because it has to fit to the work itself in the absolute best way. Recurring media are video and performance, sometimes in addition to a bigger installation and other times as isolate work. The use of my own body gives my work a performative character and therefore the medium of the performance, whether it is video or live, is a suitable way for translation. The medium I work with is free of boundaries towards the next idea. www.charlottevanwinden.com

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Charlotte van Winden

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Charlotte van Winden An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn

Upon completing my high school exams, I started Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. When I graduated three years later, I directly started at The Royal Academy of Arts (in The Hague) because although I was inspired by theory, I felt the urgent need to turn each fact into subjectivity. The reason I had originally started university was because of the idea that there is no better school for arts than

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is a captivating short film by multidisciplinary artist Charlotte van Winden: inquiring into the ambiguity of the notion of reality, she initiates her audience into an unconventional and highteneed visual experience capable of triggering the audience perceptual and cultural parameters. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to van Winden's multifaceted artistic production. Hello Charlotte and welcome to : you have a solid background and you graduated from the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Hague: how did this experiences influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit www.charlottevanwinden.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work: while walking us through your process, would you like to tell to our readers something about the evolution of your style? In particular, do you think that there is a central idea that connects all your works?

The video Why I Never Became A Stalker was a sort of turn figure in how I worked before and after. In the first months upon graduation, the components of my work were 100 % artificial. I wanted to be the only creator of my work so there was no use of existing video footage, other performers or ready-mades. Being the creator gave me total power like a sort of God that creates the perfect picture. In a way not that much has changed, but now I leave more space for things from reality, like the footage of a mental hospital in the early seventies that you see in the

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the school of life itself. The broad layout of Cultural Studies seemed perfect to develop myself and to see where to go after that. But during philosophy, literature and history classes I got too inspired by some of the tiny details of the material that I got destracted from writing strong scientific exams. So after three years I graduated as a mediocre student with my head in the clouds. Art school was the next best thing to use the power to create and translate my subjectivity into a visual language. I think the material from university added some good basis to understand better where I stand and I continue to use a lot of the interesting stories from some of the professors. The stories with personal or fun details from the philosophers or writers stayed with me the most. I guess I have made up my own philosophy based on fragments that I misunderstood or wrongly remembered: the perfect basis to create something new.

Yes, I think there is a central idea that connects my work and that is about the aspect of a formable world which is also the reason I am an artist. The ruling domination of the Western world in which we are living is nowadays signed by capitalist norms and values, where an everlasting suppressed optimism is a central element with progress and success as leading fundamentals. If you want to become something, the perfect starting point seems to be to create it yourself. But on the other hand this mentality exaggerates the futility of everything. Why would you try so hard if you will die anyway? Albert Camus' advice to kill yourself as the wisest thing to do is something completely opposite to the capitalist thinking. With the fascination of both opposites, I challenge the borders of the formable world, which is absurd and it's fooling you, to investigate the power to create. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Why I Never Became A Stalker, an extremely interesting film that our readers have already staterd to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful combination between highly evokative footage is the way you have provided the visual results of your analysis with coherent combination between autonomous aesthetics and visual consistence. While walking

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video. I wanted to break with the complete fictional work, where the story did not come out of it's own borders. Now I make use of music that is not only played or sung by myself, I use footage that I find online, on YouTube for example and I more often use ready-mades and typecasted assistents. Yet I still manipulate everything.

Why I Never Became A Stalker shows a drama story about an unanswered love that drives the main character completely obsessed and almost crazy. The voice-over is based on thoughts and memories that are in fact always subjective, even if you think they are based on facts. Some things you tell yourself unconsciously to feel better and to get a grip, so that you can process it and move on. In fact you are fooling yourself and deceive the reality to survive. In this video I play with those elements of false memories and let the main character step out of it to survive. The construction and the title of Tracey Emins video Why I Never Became A Dancer was a source of inspiration where she used a similar change as a climax from memory to self-intervention. Her intervention offers consolation by dancing as a way of processing the past. In my work the main character creates an even worse world where she escapes into a suicidal horror show as a way to survive. Your work addresses the viewers to such captivating multilayered experience through the liminal area where the real and the unreal blurry their elusive boundaries: when commenting this aspect of your work, would you tell us how do you view the relationship between concepts of the real and the imagined playing within your practice?

I like to mix up real and unreal, but in the end it doesn't really matter to me if something is real or imagined. For me it is a starting point but not a goal. At times people ask me if something they see in a video really happened, but to me it has become something new, autonomous. As a starting point I think the possibility of creation is very fruitful to give meaning to things that are built on imaginations and also on copies from reality. I experience a lot of possibilities to create things

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our readers through the genesis of Why I Never Became A Stalker, would you tell what did draw you to focus on the notion of the formability of life?

The soundtrack of Why I Never Became A Stalker provides the film with such uncanny atmosphere: according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you see the relationship between sound and moving images?

In this video I created the sound the same way as the visuals, as a sort of stream of consciousness. Both were essential for the atmosphere in the video where the story was built on loose memories. The only grip in the work is led by the voice-over, but in fact the voice is of an questionable narrator, she is completely obsessed after being rejected by someone she is in love with and doubting her own memory. The sound and image here are complementary to the spoken thoughts in the first half. In the final part, the focus is on the horror image that is supported by sound. In some videos I deliberately don't make use of any sound. When I do use sound, it is always additional to the work itself, even when it is used in a supportive way, because I consider it as very determinative for the atmosphere, yet in every work in a complete different manner.

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in life, such as a fictive artist that I created once to form a duo exhibition with. If I miss something in reality, I feel the urge to create it myself. At the time I made a fictive duo exhibition with a German artist from Arabic background that I called Zsigmund Alaeddin. It was not my purpose to just fool the audience, but to present an interesting art exhibition where the works of two artists worked together very well. Within the show there was a small video projected on the side where you could see me hiring a suitable actor and making Alaeddin's work.

My inspiration comes mostly from daily social life, the way people behave, move, talk and their attitudes, which go hand in hand with my imaginations. It is inspiring how different they are and also how people can be all the same. Working with my own body and face to express different figurants means that I am doomed to fail in credibility, because a lot of appearances are just not achievable. For me that is okay, because I don't need to present a realistic view of something that already exists. This failure in credibility is subservient to the malleable power and encourages me to create a world built on false truths. Working with my own appearances as a starting point gives me every time the same canvas, there is no other personality involved, there is no typecasting and I stay close to creation, rather than describing things very credible. In my latest works I often mix staged performance with found footage where you can see other people too as a way to break with every border. While forming an idea, things can stay very long very abstract in a way. By recording some unfinished thoughts, I create myself an open playground for valuable additions that are not scripted but led by a certain abstract feeling. I make use of make-up, hair and textile which function as suggestive body masks with identifying elements. In lens based media and sculpture I easily can reproduce myself, but during live performance I do like to work with assistents that I do choose through typecasting in the same way that I make use of footage in video.

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As you have remarked once, your own body is always the basis for your characters: many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once remarked that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": as a performance artist involved both in lens based media works and sculptures, how would you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the ideas you explore and the physical act of producing your artworks?

If I think about political art than I immediately see similarities with political philosophy. In that sense I would say that my art is political because of the human act as a central focus. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt explains the ways of living. She pleads for a life dedicated to contemplation, spirital or intellectual, what she calls vita activa. She puts this way of life above animal laborans and homo faber because there is no interaction. Vita activa involves freedom, status and the fact that action is subject to nothing else but acting itself. We can therefore only experience our freedom in a social interaction. This freedom is reflected in daring to think against the grain of the prevailing social way of thinking. In the part of the world I live in, the ruling system is built on capitalist ways of thinking with producing and consuming. Of course I am stuck in that system too, but I also have the possibilities to enrich myself with history and philosophy to explore different frames. In that way it becomes more universal playing with the time spirit of the current. In The Netherlands I am asked to represent the province Zuid-Holland in a large-scaled project called

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Your practice conveys an effective sociopolitical criticism when challenging the normative capitalist ways of thinking: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role differs depending on which part of the world youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in. It depends on the political system youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re living under". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Joep van Lieshout's works, could be considered political, do you think that your work could be considered political in a certain sense? Moreover, what could be in your opinion the role of Art in the contemporary age?

Entre Nous with eleven other artists that represents the other provinces. They were looking for socially committed artists and they selected me for how my work relates to its environment and play with reality. So in that sense some people apparently think my work is political or socially committed. The role of art today fits with the idea of the vita activa because it goes beyond a form of a one-dimensional life. Of course there are meanings about art that it gives enrichment and depth and I agree with that, but I prefer to consider its role very simple and basic. When I visited Athens this summer to visit the local art scene I went to the NEON foundation where a contributor talked about their concepts. She explained that they wanted to use public abandoned spots of Athens and repair them, in collaboration with an artist who will make it into a temporary exhibition space and then leave it behind in a better way than before. In that way NEON tries to find a connection to the inhabitants of Athens and at the same time they will bring them in contact with contemporary art. Because, she said, art is about life and it is for the people. Although this very simple line could have been said by anyone, the simplicity stirred me. In your works you include a wide variety of materials such as hair, makeup and textile riches with suggestive and sometimes symbolic evokative power. How much important is for you to use such materials in order to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to urge them to elaborate personal meanings and associations?

I work with such materials to suggests some recognizable elements from reality. As a late teenager I was told something that had a big impact on my thoughts and on my practice nowadays, which is that if you want to start a revolution, you have to make very small, almost invisible changes so people will not notice any big change that will scare them off because it is too far from them. Later I read

Your observation of distinction between the artificial and the natural to find common points of convergence seems to be very analytical, yet your works strive to be full of emotion: how would you consider the relationship between analysis and spontaneity within

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some notebooks by Antonio Gramsci about hegemony by which I feel inspired. In his work, like in the works by Karl Marx, he sees the spread of Christianity in The Middle Ages as an exemplary example to influence the hegemony in a very subtle way. Actually I must say that my work is not so premeditated that I consider every possible detail whether it is inside or outside the borders of a small change, but I do like to fantasize about it a lot. I also like to disconnect on purpose by making some choices in a certain appareance or in the way I edit just to alienate, but there are always things related to realistic elements, I am not interested in creating work only about sci-fi or fantasy. With the use of make-up, wigs and clothing I exaggerate the construction of identity and at the same time sectarianism. If I focus too much only on the appearences of people I am able to drive myself nuts because I don't like to contribute too much to fixed codes. There is more to discover outside the code world, for example some unexpected fusion. A good example from reality that really fascinates me is the way how punks and skins melted in the late seventies in the United Kingdom as almost one subculture. In the sixties the first generation of skinheads were very anti the flowerpower cult, they had their own complete different codes. In the seventies the melting of those groups was a very enriching element for music, clothing and history itself. I love to make use of stereotypes, like expressing a typical nerd or a sexy woman but not without shaking the codes in a very subtle way.

your work? In particular, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer to meticolously schedule every details of your works? how much importance does play improvisation in your process?

The video was built very scripted. I wanted to add a brutal plot change that modifies the genre completely to get a kind of inner story in the work itself. I wrote the script as if the main character completely took over the direction herself. In general I would say that there is always a basic fascination that drives me to create art. Yet there is not one single way for me to work best. Most of the works come from an idea which mostly suddenly pop up and that can happen anywhere. Sometimes I feel the urge to translate that idea immediately into a work and do not stop untill the basis is made. That feels like I am controlled by a genius idea. Other ideas I leave in my mind for a certain time, write and sketch something down and just dream about it. Those ideas are most of the time worked out very analytically by a script like Why I Never Became A Stalker. During recording there is still a lot of improvisation and while I am editing I sometimes choose parts where I am not performing at all, but where I take a break to write or think without awareness of the camera. Quite often there are days where I am making a variety of things spontaneously in my studio. Over the years your works have been showcased in several occasions: one of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are provided with the opportunity to become active participants and are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

The audience is present in my head most of the time when

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Charlotte. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I am selected for an artist in residency where I will represent the province Zuid-Holland, during the whole month September. It is called Entre Nous and it is in Drenthe, in the Netherlands. All the twelve provinces are represented by one artist or art duo from that province. The residency is situated in a camp that is built by the Dutch army, every artist has their own militairy tent to sleep in and a container to use as studio. For a month we are the inhabitants of that camp, but there are a lot of conferences and meetings based on the welfare state on the same terrain. This whole project was inspired by a trial colony in 1818 that was formed by Johannes van den Bosch. The eternal utopian ways of thinking for societies

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working in my studio. I often think about dialogues of imaginary spectators. In the first months after graduation I heard my former teachers talking to me in my head with quotes as “Now you are killing it”, “Nobody is waiting for you out there” or “What am I looking at?”. In installation work I prefer to offer an element of interaction and in some performances as well. I like to play with offering a sort of disneyfied experience but then in an absurdist way that does not belong to fairytales, as a way to eliminate comfortability. In general I play with the recognizable elements I mentioned before just to offer a guidance so that I don't lose the understanding of the audience too soon. Yet there will always be people who are structurally scared of blood and human sized sculptures and can not pass through that, to whom I have got nothing to say. I don't like to make adjustments because I am not in advertising.

fascinate me and I would like to do my own research in that area in combination with failures and eternal dystopian alternatives. Another thing that I would love to do is to go to Paul McCarthy's studio in LA to learn there for a few months. I consider his work very inspiring and it is one of the few artists still alive that I see as the biggest of all time. Next to his work I am also impressed by the way he and his son manage the large studio with a lot of good craftsmen as employees. I think you can compare the way they work to a film production studio with two directors in charge. In addition to my own practice I am active with my artist run space in The Hague. It is called Moose Space and it focuses on young emerging artists that graduated between one and five years ago. It's nice to work with artists that are in the same stadium as I am and to add a stage for experimental presentations of fine arts. It is a place where I welcome different types of audience, a lot of artists and art students are coming here, but also neighbours, homeless people and the alderman. The artists that are selected are working independently on the preparation of a show, without external curating to stimulate the self-support. I like to see some developments in the work I did since graduation. Where it started as a totally fictional world that I created as a sort King of the Gods, I now see more openings outside of that world, which gives me a lot more freedom. In my last video 'Elevator', in addition to staged performance, I used subtle cuts from YouTube, as well as own recordings on the street and in public buildings like a hospital. It feels like I am discovering more ingredients to get a better taste. I work on a continous philosophy that is built on fragments that are partly true and partly made up to understand and add to the world.

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Maria Gall Lives and works in Bucharest, Romania An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn

With captivating imagery and inventiveness, An artistic point of view is an effective mix of surreal atmospheres and audacious storytelling, capable of walking the viewers through a multilayered visual experience. Hello Maria and welcome to Women Cinemakers: letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s start our conversation with a little introduction from you. What is your background? Please ell us what brought you into the world of contemporary art and what addressed your artistic trajectory. In the world of contemporary art, of course, I had the desire to express myself through the most appropriate language, that of the painting I wanted and I think, I have largely succeeded in restoring it in order to overcome the limits of the definition of this

art As an art of two-dimensional excellence, and open by three dimensional process new territories of artistic investigation. I refer here in particular to the threedimensional painting I created between 1999 and 2000, when realizing it seemed to be impossible once the painting resembled a colorful surface no matter how the color applied to the substrate. I wanted so much that the key element of painting - the color - would be free itself from any surface, whether bi or tridimensional, and any ingredient mixed in the paste, and I wanted so much that the color paste took a three-dimensional shape as a volume in itself Space and the color of their own shapes to form the painting that, behold, by doing these things in an unprecedented way, we have come into the world of contemporary art following this path.

If the stain - the color paste had to play the only role in creating painting without cloth, cardboard, paper, frame, chassis or other accessories unnecessary to painting, then the next step was to the sculpture, another dear field in which the sculpture endowed as a robot With light, motion, sound, sensors, etc. But with a primary shape that retains only vague identification markers of the real model, attempts to interpret, take on the role of the actor in the scene, thus coming out of the exhibition hall. In short, I could answer with one word to this question: passion brought me into contemporary art, the joy of creating. We would address our readers to visit https://vimeo.com/user6153141 to get a wider idea about your artistic production, that ranges from filmmaking to animation, from illustration and sound design, revealing that you are a versatile artist capable of crossing from different areas: how do you select a particular media to express the idea of a project? By transfer. Artistic language, in my opinion, is common to all arts. Whether we are talking about painting, sculpture, cinema, dancing, etc. I think all artistic fields are based on the same language, but each field uses specific transferable terms that you can easily identify, adapt and use if you are an artist from one domain to another. It's like translating a French sentence into, for example, English. It sounds

For this special edition of Women Cinemakers we have selected An artistic point of view, an interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of this work is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of this captivating project, would you tell us what were some of your aesthetic decisions? I have to confess that "An artistic point of view" is my first film, that when I realized it, I did not think I made a film production - that I wanted to make a movie - I want to create a picture of my pictorial and sculptural creation through filmmaking, which I could not achieve by means of exposure to art galleries without the payment of fees that go beyond my material possibilities for the exhibition space and for transporting the works so The offers received for exhibitions by museums and very good galleries remained in van as long as in my country the sponsorship of artists was and is a lost cause.

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different words, but the translated sentence has the same meaning, the same meaning if the translator does his job well.

Therefore, relinquishing resignation to the idea of exhibiting my creation, I turned to explore the cinematic potential for its presentation, using the same aesthetic principles used in the plastic art that we adapted using as a pause between the visual images the texts Explaining that in the mute movie to emphasize and accentuate the double text-to-image informative message. I don't like to reproduce anything in painting or sculpture, nor to tell. I think, for example, states like pain or joy, exaltation or ecstasy, etc. , Which you want to transmit to the receiver, give them the more intense the reason you do not tell them the cause or the reason these conditions have occurred, concentrating on the aesthetic means through which you can induce that pure state in all its intensity. Essentially, not the cause, but the effect matters. As in painting, a painted flower does not smell like a natural flower, does not have that softness to touch, we do not find the space of the natural habitat, can't live and transmits in other words with the same intensity its primordial creative state so the solution in my concept Is to create an equivalent to foreign means of its nature with the means of our fingerprinting by the flower if you want to get to the essence of the flower.

The first part of An artistic point of view shows what you think your sculpture MUST be and not what they want others to see: artists always vary in the importance placed on communicating their own visions without limitation or question and the emphasis and importance placed on the audience, and how it can and will relate to them. How do you feel when people interpret your artwork inversely, or is there one primary thing you hope to have the viewer experience? It has never happened to me to interpret my painting and sculptural creation differently from what I wanted it to convey. In fact, at the foundation of my painting there is no concept. The concept is only its construction - the basis is that this painting proposes and creates another way of painting, and this leaves no room for erroneous interpretations. If this happens somehow in the movie that presents my work, it means I did not put the room inside the painting, I did not present my creation as it actually does through the film's specific means, it means I did not find the key

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Good artists, changing dates to achieve their purpose, create something other than a flower that impresses as much as the flower of nature.

The common language, as I would have liked, that we didn't find the common means of expression because my painting allows the exhibition hall to enter inside it, to circulate among the stains, offering what I missed in the picture, and the sculpture My reaction reaches what she wants in front of an "obstacle" always different depending on the aggression exercised over her, forcing the receiver to perceive and not to interpret. Your works convey a captivating abstract feeling: how do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works? Let us refer strictly to the terms: abstract, real, imaginary. Abstract is a completely inappropriate term for my painting and sculpture that does not juggle with concepts. My painting is the most radical painting, because the essence of the painting is the color spot it uses exclusively, eliminating all unnecessary painting accessories such as canvas, cardboard, chassis, nails, frames, etc. The respective color spots are made only of dry paste of different three-dimensional shapes and of different structures that are supported in the air without incorporating other materials inside them and which construct the overall shape of the painting through which the receiver can pass to them , To look at them from any

point. They impose the show through light, color, shape, structure, space, size, without claiming an interpretation of what they are. I define only a new world of color in which you penetrate and from which you come out feeling that you have gone through a world from which you came sad, cheerful, frightened etc. , Depending on the color, shapes and brightness ranges used. This painting is real, as real as it can only be that the color isn't placed on any surface, whether bi or three-dimensional, but stays in the air and forces you to pass through the color schemes and trajectories bypassing them or stopping by focusing In the internal space of painting by composition. My sculpture is minimalist, not abstract, but on the contrary. Consisting of primary shapes - spheres, ovoid, plus a few accessories that suggest the real world they want to represent - accessories suggestive of the identity of the being to which we refer, eggs in different stages of hatching, birds, etc. In addition, on the principle of form-fitting form, it is equipped with complex mechanisms designed to anime in order to interpret its role. Here, here comes the fictional imaginary term. To play a role, sculpture plays an imaginary story in a real or built-in scenario like the actor in the movie or theater. But the story remains just a pretext.

Reminding us of VÂ ra ChytilovĂĄ's work's work, your artistic production in the field of animation is marked out with a personal style: who are, if any, some of your chief influences from contemporary scene? My professional training is strictly in the field of fine arts finalized with a doctorate in plastic and decorative arts. Otherwise, I am, I recognize a self-taught and debutant, above all, in cinematography. Maybe here comes the personal style you are talking about talking about animation, without being able to talk about the influences of the contemporary scene in this unexplored field enough for me. I can only talk about the desire to make a movie from a set of photos that I made on a holiday and which happened to happen in my mind on an idea, and in order to establish their connection they imposed a Processing the data as I experienced at the moment. Your visual vocabulary has a very ambivalent visual quality. How do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works? How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice?

I adapt my means of expression from one artistic field to another by translating them from a real plan into another real plan that belongs to the aesthetic reality. Passing through the foliage of several trees with the same cadence of steps will you notice differences in density, flavor, temperature, scratches - abstract signs? On your arm and face, the color differences - even beyond the season. Separating sensations and signs, they seem abstract but unifying them to reality. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your pieces, that are often marked out with intense tones, capable of creating tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological makeup determine the nuances of tones you decide to use in a piece? At the risk of repeating myself, I assert that all the arts use the same language through which you express an idea. I don't use the color palette. The colors of my painting are dry paste that evolves freely in space as it happens in dance, music, etc. Having their own shape, a serious or acute tone, their own optical movement - my color spots juggle with the receiver like the word in a sentence: put it there in the grammatical form that

is needed; Such as the repetition of a ballet movement - a spot you find more attenuated or more acute in another place of painting if you take a few steps, such as a higher or worse sound in the music. A color is warmer or cooler, lighter or darker depending on the meaning you attribute to the general context... Everything in the arts is limited to image, movement, weight, gravity, sound, and some other terms common to all arts and used by artists to speak as expressively as possible. We want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? The future of women in the cinema as well as the future of women in all other artistic fields seems to be a metallic gate that is still difficult to solve by itself but easily opened by the accumulation of forces, their taking over, their

processing and transformation into essences. As far as I'm concerned, I no longer care about the future if we only refer to career here, but what is the greatest weight in my vision is the value of the art that they produce. I wish that the value in art-referring to the quality of the artistic act-to impose either that the artistic act is created by a man or a woman, and the barriers to failure do not fall on value but on incompetence. Thanks for your time and thought, Maria. We wish you all the best with your filmmaker career! What's next for Maria Gall? I thank you for the attention you have given me! It's only six months since I decided to address this area seriously, and I'm trying to get around with a 15year-old PC and a phone, but that's not the biggest impediment, but the fact that I'm afraid of myself, as I said before, to make the transfer of language data from the world of fine arts into that of convinced cinema, as it will be a great advantage: I think I will make my own debut with the movie I'm working on At present and which will be called "Time and Percentages of Love". I also want you - successful successes of quality, value and perseverance - the keys to excellence.

An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn