Women CineMakers, Special Edition, vol.9 by WomenCinemakers

INDEPENDENT

WOMENâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

EXPERIMENTAL

CINEMA ROXANA BARBA ALEXANDRA HOLOWNIA TAYLOR YOCOM BAHAR BORNA FARAZ FERNANDA BERTERO ALYONA LARIONOVA MINJUNG IM GINGER LIU INKERI JANTTI GINGER LIU SOOZ BELNAVIS

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Contents 04

Sooz Belnavis

130 Fernanda Bertero

156

Ginger Liu

Bahar Borna Faraz

178

Inkeri JÃ¤ntti

Taylor Yocom

196

Minyung Im

Alexandra Holownia

110

220

Alyona Larionova

Roxana Barba

Whatever is Touched is Spoiled

I Have Lost Myself

Add A Line

Sequence 13

Pussy Face

Screen Test: Part One

AUTHENTIC

Still Life

The Birth of Mars Generation

The End of The Beginning

Women Cinemakers meets

Sooz Belnavis Lives and works in _________________________________ Sooz Belnavis has her history in fashion, costume and textiles, as a costume maker she constructed costumes for theatre, tv and film. Some years later she became a multidisciplinary artist where her formal interests lay in mark making. She uses the gesture to create effects both dramatic & visceral. This physicality manifests itself in abstract expressionist paintings, gestural paintings of the nude, alongside ‘kinetic’ paintings, text based paintings, collage, photography, site specific performance and art installations. Her interest in the ‘female nude’ is one of context, social & political, regarding the identity and status of women, historically and culturally. Her fascination with design is rooted in the world of fashion and textiles. Fashion campaigns influence her abstract expressionist paintings which in turn become loaded with feminine motifs such as tights, nail varnish and synthetic hair. The synthetic hair, “an extension of the brushstroke,” allows the theatricality Belnavis so often features in her work. Text is also used subliminally in her white paintings and her kinetic paintings, where movement reveals a hidden text, or as branded slogans in the form of collages, juxtaposed with paintings of the nude executed on paper. Regarding poetry and performance in particularThe Red Line, which is a 25 minute performance dramatically staged in the crypt of St Mary Madelene’s church in London in 2011, it includes her poetry, opera and a gestural landscape. The byproducts of the performance evolve, later becoming elements in further art installations. Belnavis’ works often have an interactive element to them, where the viewer is encouraged to contribute to the artwork thus adding an extra dimension and meaning to the piece. Since 2011 Belnavis has performed her poetry at art exhibitions, art residencies internationally, at poetry events, on the radio (Newsagents, Resonance FM). She has written a commissioned piece to commemorate the boy soldiers in WW1 He Loves Me He Loves Me Not, May 2016. She has also had an article published online for Artlyst, Colour Blind: Expressions Of A Society Unheard in response to Basquiat’s: Boom For Real Exhibition, Barbican 2017. Belnavis has exhibited many times in London, the UK and internationally, including 56th & 57th Venice Biennales, The Rebel Angels 2015 and, Empire II 2017, an exhibition featuring 3 minute films of 118 artists, of which a 3 minute version of The Red Line was featured. The show has toured London, Brussels, Venice, Kendal, Berlin, next stop Tallinn Estonia, Paris in October, Mexico next year.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

explore the theme of feminine identity in our everchanging

and Dora S. Tennant

contemporary age, to trigger their perceptual and cultural

womencinemaker@berlin.com

parameters. Featuring elegant cinematography and sapient

The Red Line is a captivating performance by British visual artist and performer Sooz Belnavis: creating an atmosphere marked with captivating allegorical qualities, she invites the viewers to

performance composition, The Red Line is a moving tribute to universality of woman, capable of encouraging crosspollination of the spectatorship. We are particularly pleased to

Women Cinemakers introduce our readers to Belnavis' captivating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Sooz and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You hold a BA of Fashion, Costume & Textiles and you later nurtured your education with a BA of Fine Arts in Painting, that you received from Manchester Metropolitan University: how did these experiences influenced your artistic evolution? In particular, how does your cultural substratum allude to your previous work in theatre, fashion and as a stylist, inform your current creative process?

It was my first impulse, as perhaps most artists will say, they drew as a very small child. My mum said I did this before I could hold myself upright. I drew to communicate with my mother when I had not yet learnt to speak, then with my classmates as a flag of peace against their antagonism. It was a refuge I could lose myself in for hours. Communication is the impulse of self expression I think. My Mum used to tell us stories of her life in Jamaica. She would tell me about the beautiful dresses they had made for them when they were growing up and I think thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s where my interest in fashion stemmed from. I remember she allowed me to use her wedding dress for playing dress up. It was the most beautiful thing Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d ever seen, white organza with white embroidery and fine lace on the sleeves and bodice. I wore it until it fell into rags. I remember too that she and my Aunt used to make dresses and woollens for myself and my two cousins. So my early interests in drawing and needlework took me down the path of fashion and costume design and I spent my first decades working as a maker. When I finally returned to my first love, drawing and painting, in 1999 it was such a powerful awakening as a fine artist, it changed me totally. It took me a long time after qualifying as a BA fine artist to find the bridge between the things that interested me, fashion, film, Theatre, Architecture, photography and more. It also took a long time to see that the driver behind my work was social justice. Social injustice, I realise, because as a child I was subjected to racial prejudice, racial abuse and bullying. This was because though my parents were Jamaican I look

Women Cinemakers mixed race. The racial abuse wasn’t just restricted solely to white British; I was sometimes racially abused by black people as well, for being too white. In the areas my parents chose to live, I was always the sole child of colour. Of course I was bullied, but I also stood up for the kids who were bullied as well. The thing that saved me was I was talented at sports. I literally ran for my life, the other children couldn’t catch me if we were outside, so the incidences of bulling lessened over time as I was the kid who teams wanted on their side. But at home, though I was strong and fast, I couldn’t work out why I was being treated differently from my younger brothers and that bothered me. Of course you don’t have the vocabulary to question these things when you are a child, apart from that it’s not fair, the injustice of it, but things will out and of course over time I realised it was to do with the fact that I was female and all that that entailed. One of my favourite acts of escapism when I was growing up was to watch old movies, especially historical dramas. I adored the costumes and the clothes up to the 1940’s, the beauty of the fabrics, the cut, the embellishments, all of it thrilled me. But when I chose to write my first thesis for my BA in Fashion, Costume and Textiles in 1983, it was It was a massive contradiction for me, beauty on and the truth behind what it took for women to accomplish every silhouette throughout the centuries, it floored me. Beauty, the facade and the physical reality of those two dichotomies has stayed with me I guess and woven it’s way into my psyche. When I studied fashion I soon realised I was not going to be able to produce things like the 1930’s or 1940’s Dior for the fashion market so I changed to a costume, textiles and fashion course so i was able to do it all in some way for theatre. I watched with utter delight at the meteoric rise of John Galliano as he designed the kind of clothes I dreamed of. All the while I devoured glossy magazines especially Vogue. That was my way into the world of beauty and the fantasy of fashion. In 1996 I was fortunate enough to work backstage on two of Alexander McQueen’s fashion shows, the winter then the spring collections. For me as a costume maker to witness the editing process that McQueen carried out minutes before the models were due to go on the runway

was breathtaking. He wielded a pair of shears with the finesse of a master swordsman, his decisions were utterly, emphatic he never hesitated. He was totally fearless. Another thing I began to appreciate about his work over the years was the political element he fed into his shows, which made them controversial and earned him his title â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;

of fashion. It was a

complex, social and political dialogue he wanted to have with the fashion world. With his genius and foresight he managed to project a fierce beauty with a stark political stance embedded in his work . His work ticked so many boxes for me, the theatricality and staging of his shows and the hybridity of his designs. His designs held so many ideas fused together to create a beautiful masterpiece all the while edged with an inner pain, or disquiet. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think, then or now, that there is

anybody who comes close to his creativity or vision in the fashion world. Leaving fashion behind, my later embarkation into Fine Art was an extraordinary awakening on an intellectual and academic level exploring the nature of mark making. It was superseded by the practical application of course, but I began using fabrics, latex and tights to create paintings that werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily academic abstract paintings, they were hybrids like me, I suppose, neither one thing nor another. One moment which instigated my eureka moment was encountering a work by Eva Hesse, 1966, at her retrospective at the Tate Modern. It is a loop of wire attached to the frame looping out into space and back again attaching to the bottom of the frame. For me it seemed to theatricalise the negative space it drew in the air. (

Helen Molesworth Me You Us: Eva Hesse’s Early Paintings “ [……] creating a hollow void where we have grown to expect pictorial fullness”) It seemed to have many possibilities hanging there, inviting you in, or an invisible barrier (repulsing) barring your way. It was a fascinating painting. A 2003 with Eva few years later I painted Hesse’s in mind. Using the gesture, the frame and hair as a political and social commentary it enabled me to address issues such as race, the feminine, in that I was interested in the use of hair. For me, it was a powerful symbol in that i saw it as an extension of the brush stroke. Also using hair as a political statement was a commentary on the proliferation of synthetic hair, as part of women’s identity and ideal beauty. At the time in 2003 Beyonce was a rising pop icon, and as an African American she wore long tumbling

blonde locks. This gave rise to other celebrities, like Victoria Beckham donning real hair extensions, but it fed directly into black women’s psyche and their idea of what they considered to be the ideal beauty. Today it is more common to see black women with long straight synthetic hair than it is for them to have their natural hair on show. I was also made aware how politicalised hair was when 9/11 happened and the aftermath in Afghanistan. Many pictures of veiled women made the headlines in the newspapers and this subconsciously influenced my paintings. J’hador 2001 and Cultured Hair 2003 are mixed media paintings directly related to those times. I also began using trend colours of fashion campaigns to influence my pallet which is evident in a very energetic and colourful painting Idor that has silver studs over the the surface of the canvas, Idor is an anagram of Dior.

Because film is also a particular love of mine I also found ways to be able to feed cinematic influences into my work. Pussy Wagon 2004 was a painting I made to assuage myself from a particularly harrowing scene, in Tarantino’s Kill Bill, 2003 where Uma Thurman’s character is abused whist in a coma. I was able to transmute my trauma through this painting, whilst another painting, Theres No Beauty In Being Scared 2003 was in direct response to the Japanese Horror film I saw, Ringu/Ring 2000. The main character had a veil of black hair covering her face, it was really unnerving and I needed to banish that image from my mind and did it through this painting. You are an eclectic artist and your versatile practice ranges from performance to collage and painting, revealing the

ability of crossing from a media to another: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite in to our readers to visit order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does (attracts) address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select in order to explore a particular aspect of your artist research? I think I have a magpie nature, I am interested and stimulated by so many media. It was frowned upon when i was at college to diversify. If you were a painter that’s what you had to concentrate on. Commercially if you wanted to be a successful artist you had to chose. I didn’t go on to do an MA so I basically did what I wanted and if I had a burning ambition or a topic I

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certainly were no women who looked mixed race. Oh how things have changed, but it’s taken almost 20yrs to have a diversity of imagery ie, women of colour in mainstream fashion magazines that’s happened so very recently, in the last 2 years. And now with the appointment of Edward Enninful at the end of last year Adowa Aboah ( who is of mixed heritage) graced the front cover of the December edition of British Vogue, so “times are a changin! “ I recently rehashed one of those images for an exhibition held at the time of 57th Venice Biennale 2018 ‘Fit the slit’ on the theme of Surveillance. I vandalised the image by stitching all over it, I reversed writing on the back. So when you held it up to the light it told you to “Stop fuckin lookin!”

wanted to comment on, I chose the best medium. I did a series of photographs called when mobile phones with cameras literally came onto the market. As I had aways hated my photograph being taken, I was motivated to take selfportraits, ones that I could control and choreograph. I decided to use stylised poses, the ones I saw time and time again in Vogue magazine. But I set myself some self imposed rules, no makeup, only using natural light and I allowed myself six attempts to get an image I was ‘ok’ with. It was a comment on retouching the image, control of the image, acceptance and not stressing about the self, (the critical self), sexualisation of the image and also the excepted norm as at the time there were very few women at all who resembled me in any fashion magazines. There was hardly any diversity amongst those glossy pages of those fashion magazines or in the media There

I like to play with the unexpected. One of my works has an image of the back view of a female nude. As you approach it it reveals text, which exposes the shocking statistic of sex slavery of women and girls in the UK. This piece was made in response to an article I read n 2006 when the number then was 80,000. Recently there has been publicity in the media to raise awareness on this subject in Uk, very recently The Evening Standard, a London paper, ran a lengthy campaign to expose this matter. I took the opportunity to show this piece, Buy One Get One Free, on the same night as I performed upstairs in the church of St Mary Madelene’s. It was positioned opposite a painting of the Madonna and child, to reflect on women’s present and historical status. Again I wanted to catch the viewer unawares, to wrong foot them, the theatre of the piece making them pay attention to something they might have dismissed in the gloom. For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting

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performance 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 insightful inquiry into the relationship between feminine identity and our everchanging societies is the way the results of your artistic? research provides the viewers with such an intense visual experience, by elegant . While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us what fascinates you regarding the theme of the ? I wanted to present many different qualities of the feminine to show what I felt was aspects of what some women were facing in the world then and now. I wanted to show that past experiences still resonates with the present. At the time it seemed to me very little had changed for women in some parts of the world. Ultimately the thing that binds all women is that we bleed. I wrote the poem The Red Line in 2006 when it seemed that feminism had plateaued, that there was a general belief that having the vote and being allowed to work, we’d accomplished equality. Like, “well we’re done, what’s your problem”? But I kept reading stories of women dealing with the same old shit especially those that were not in the “West” and their experiences were far from ideal. I felt that these women’s voices needed to be heard. At that time not only did I write The Red Line, I also wrote The Three Graces, a poem inspired by the witch hunt carried out in the British tabloids and media which ran the leading scoop of the year, Kate Moss, fashion icon and international model was caught on camera allegedly taking cocaine, with her then boyfriend, bad boy Pete Doherty, of the Libertines. She was being pilloried in all the papers and was about to be ostracised by the fashion industry and hung out to dry. This got me wondering about women’s propensity to pick bad boys or their seemingly misjudged attraction to ‘bad men’ . The myth persists, why and where does that come from? I was curious about

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how this predicament plays itself out. How women perpetuate this myth and how it has instilled itself in women’s psyches. Stories told and retold of women’s ability to throw caution to the winds and destroy themselves for love. So with The Three Graces I paid homage to Kate Moss, Marilyn Monroe and Madame Bovary. Madame Bovary because her rise and fall was far more provincial, but her story was one easily understood by ordinary women. I wanted to explore the notion of how wanting something different can be your downfall, hers was one of avarice and desire for a better more exciting life. And with Marilyn Monroe, well her tragic story is there for all to see and speculate over. Later when I was thinking of how I could present my poetry, referencing and taking inspiration from the past and present, I knew I wanted to include opera mainly because of my friend who was training to become an opera singer at the time. I also chose to include the aria ‘Adio Del Passato’ ' from Puccini’s La Traviata, which was controversial at the time for portraying the life of a courtesan. And I also remembered seeing as a child an old black and white film Camille 1936 starring Greta Garbo which had moved me to tears. I had met Kristina Stanek at a musical event at a friend’s house, I heard her sing and was immediately reduced to a blubbering wreck, this had never happened to me before& I was utterly perplexed. So I knew absolutely that I wanted her unaccompanied voice for performance. I trusted that the acoustics in the crypt and her extraordinary voice would move the audience, hopefully as much as I had been. The last poem The Red Line speaks about all those women in third world countries that I’d read about and the relentless mantra that marks them out as a woman, month after month, and the consequences of that in their societies. At the climax of the performance we walk away from the audience dragging our red lines behind us down meters of pristine white

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paper.The other visual fact that I hoped would register was of our contrasting complexions, she the conventional ideal, myself the opposite. I wanted to highlight that even though we are different we have this common feminine experience that unites us. The aria was also a perfect bridge between the first poem and the last. I wanted the atmosphere to be as dramatic as possible so hence the chiaroscuro lighting, the staging, walking over meters of white paper and the climax. That action determined that my visual art practise would be in there as well. I chose material that would be absorbent and designed and made the skirts with trains so they would act effectively as brushes. The gesture later went on to form part of an installation a few weeks later. The refined cinematography of exhaults in the of the composition: what were your when conceiving this captivating project? And how did you select the location? Earlier that year 2010 I had been on an improvisation and movement workshop. I had gotten stage fright so badly the first time I read my poetry in public that I agreed to go on this workshop to try to overcome it. I don’t know how it happened but I was cast in the lead role as Medea! A last minute opportunity presented us with this church in London, Saint Mary Madelene’s, as a venue for “Medea” and it was perfect. It was a site specific performance, we were given permission to use all of the church. Some of my scenes were in the crypt and I knew that it would be perfect for The Red Line. It was so atmospheric, it was long enough for the 30 meters of paper

and the acoustics were brilliant and I knew Kristina’s voice would be amplified and have a greater impact on the audience. I had also seen Peter Greenaway’s film on Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’. It was all filmed in candlelight which had incredible intimacy, beauty and of course theatricality. What other light would you use in a church?. As I mentioned before, as child I had seen the old black and 1936 and I loved white film with Greta Garbo as Puccini’s aria from La Traviata. As a nod to that period I made the letters that looked authentic from that period; they were on good quality paper, written in ink and sealed with a wax candle seal and they acted as a visual bridge from one scene to another. Letters are mentioned at the end of The letter in the penultimate scene in La Traviata is a significant moment, it carries the news to inform Violetta Valery that she is accepted into the family, but it comes too late as she is dying of consumption. And then there’s The Red Line, in which women’s history is written in blood. And it is still being written in blood in war-torn countries and third world. reflects a conscious shift regarding the composition of performative gestures: how would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a performance ? How much importance does play in your practice? Regarding the performance The Red Line, it was a one off. We rehearsed it and documented it before the performance because I knew it would be impossible to film it live on the night only having one friend with one camera. I had gone through all the elements I wanted to cover so there was no room for spontaneity and I only had Kristina for 2 days. I made

A still from

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duplicate sets of skirts, the trays we were to stand in, they had to be shallow and as unobtrusive as possible. The candle light to mask the presence of the trays as best as I could. I made the letters which were a visual prompt to run between the end of the poem and the aria. The paper we walked on was newsprint, which was very fragile, so it had to be refreshed every time we painted it with our skirts. It was all done on a shoestring budget but my friend Mark Maxwell (Max) managed brilliantly to film all I asked him to do with one camera. As I was performing as well, it would have been too stressful to stage camera angles as well as everything else. But on the night, at the end of the twenty five minute performance, it was eerily quiet and it took a few seconds before a stunned audience responded resoundingly! Regarding spontaneity and improvisation in my practice, last year in March 2017 I was part of a group exhibition for Women’s International Day. 51% Remember Her. I improvised an audience participation under the title ‘I Draw The Line At…”. This was a totally improvised piece. I knew I wanted it to chime with Women’s International Day so I chose the slogan and I left it to the participants to name where they would draw the line. As I asked them this question, I drew a line on the back of both their hands with red lipstick. The women that took part found it very moving and empowering. Sound plays a crucial role in your work: the echo of the ambience and the excellent singing performance of your with such a dramatic collaborator provides quality capable of challenging the viewers' perceptual categories: why did you decided to include such audio commentary? And how would you consider the relationship between performative gestures and sound? I think you can successfully do one without the other or both together depending on where your focus is. Sound has long

since been vocalised by performers such as Joseph Beuys. I’m 1964 which is a visceral aware of Carlee Schneemann and orgiastic performance compared to Yves Kleins 1958, a more controlled use of the naked female body to make the gesture, which is accompanied by classical music. A contrast or an antithesis to these examples would be for me to watch a Japanese calligrapher write, in total silence, without distraction. This would give me great joy. , when I first read With regards to using audio in my poetry in public I was staggered by the immediacy of the audience’s reaction to the word. It’s rarely something you witness as an artist in the presence of the viewer. Poetry has a lot of competition for our attention, so choosing to theatricalise my work was for me the way forward. Regarding my friend Kristina’s voice, I had experienced first hand the power of her singing and I knew in that resonant space it would be amplified and the audience would literally feel it in their bodies and it would add to the powerful impact of the whole experience. I felt passionately that I wanted to have my practise present in the performance as well, hence the red lines themselves. The bloody gesture is an iconic, visceral and unmistakeable one. Because it was on paper it was a perfect action, academically and visually. My knowledge and experience as a costume maker allowed me to make the perfect garment to do the job. The trains absorbed and thereby charged the fabric as we stood performing in shallow trays of red paint. With an eye on future projects, I wanted to recycle elements of the performance which I did as wall hung art. They were part of an installation which also featured my paintings in a solo exhibition I had a couple of months later in The Barge House in London.

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Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies, as you . German visual artist Gerhard effectively did in Richter once underlined that " ": how do you consider the relation between of the ideas you aim to communicate and of creating your artworks? I like to use the physicality of ‘the askance’, of, for example, a hidden text base, of hidden motifs. By regarding things ‘askance’ I hope to conflate ideas to create a hybrid unity. Sometimes I want the viewer to be emboldened and curious enough to get involved and contribute to the work, to make them work for it, to be a part of something. So much of our life is lived as a passive consumer, a passive bystander. This way the work, i hope, will have more value, significance and relate-ability. It’s about committing to the moment. As a visual artist you create abstracts paintings, text-based paintings, as well as nude paintings and photography series: in your abstract paintings you include media and , to highlight the relationship between contemporary society’s feminine construct through the medium of abstract art. Moreover, as you have remarked once, is a reflection : moving from an intimate atmosphere that reflects it addresses the spectatorship to inquire into highly topical issues. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, " ". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Marina Abramovi 's ' to Marta Minujín's ' ', could be considered , do you think that your artistic research could be considered , in a certain sense? What could be in your

Come Lie With Me

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opinion the role of Art in order to sensitize the viewers in our contemporary age? I’m finding making art that isn’t politicised more & more problematic. With the far reaching consequences of the internet the whole world seems to have gotten a whole lot more politicised. I agree with Gabriel Orozco that it does depend on your social demographic and your social stance and your cultural heritage, for example, race. More cultures are now being invited to the artistic arena or conversation. The narrative is opening up more to ‘otherness’ as racially different peoples’ stories seem now to be of value. In 2003 I had an interview for a place as a painter on the equivalent of an MA course at the Royal Academy of Art. It was a terrible interview. At the time I didn’t think I was being political. I was exploring the gesture and he pictorial field with feminine motifs. But I was soon made aware that I was in a highly politicised meeting as the insults flew my way and I was utterly blindsided by one comment asked, with a sneer, by the man who was then in charge, “Do you really think that this is relevant today?” He was indeed talking about feminism, in 2003. I was utterly denigrated though I hadn’t mentioned feminism once. I thought ‘wow’, I could have dealt with this kind of dismissive conduct if they had been racist, but he and his male college were highly agitated because I was a woman. That blew me away, I hadn’t quite understood what a threat this was to the establishment back then…… Scroll forward to this last year and see what’s happening in the world, the response of women, we are so much more politicised because now the mainstream are having to listen to women’s voices. It can’t be wrapped up in dismissive insults anymore, because women and authorities are challenging men’s behaviour. Ultimately, if you are talking about the physicality of a woman, it’s the red line, we all bleed…. You ask, what could be in my opinion the role of Art in order to contemporary age? I think sensitize the viewers in our just the very fact, and really it’s only been in the last 4 years, that

Women Cinemakers large art institutions are starting to show more women artists. It’s been a long time coming, but it is happening slowly. Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London are making great efforts to show female artists’ work, it’s fantastic and they are getting the numbers through the doors, so there is an obvious hunger for it. Though I imagine the large commercial galleries will be slower to respond, as male artists still dominate and command far greater sums of money in the art market than any famous female artist. Your series reflects such captivating combination between realism and abstract feature, that seem to walk the viewers to the point of convergence between reality and imagination: how much important is it for you in order to address them to elaborate ? How important is it for you in order to address ? Again partly it’s down to wanting to stay within my practice, exploring and staying true to the gesture and trying to subvert the male gaze. Through the energised gesture and elimination of or not focusing on the characteristics of the naked female form in a space, with clothed people looking on. I wanted to empower the female presence in that space. I did this first in a classical sense and later with collage. In the nuances in the weight and stance of the body, there is room in the image for the viewer to imprint into that space, which is also nuanced. I further think that a semi abstracted image allows for the viewer to get in and imprint or bring something personal to the thing they are looking at. I think as humans we are constantly being offered up our own physicality as a mirror which we consume wholesale and it’s only when we are confronted with something not quite like what we are used to seeing that we stop and engage on another level. I know from personal experience that I

speed read through visuals now as our access is unlimited via the internet and apps such as instagram. Your collages seems to aim to create a new narrative and phrasing by placing different materials from different times: how do you conceive the visual unity of your artworks? In particular, what does appeal you of the subjects that you includes in your collages? What appeals to you about the subjects you include in your collages? Historically the female image is a loaded platform. Commercially, society or the male gaze has offered up the female to be moulded, venerated, exchanged, sexed up, clothed, unclothed, ravaged, discarded, for whatever trend or narrative society wishes to play out. Last year I think there was a culmination of world, or should I say Western events that led to a social shift for many women in the West. I think that some of it had to do with, and I know it sounds strange, the screening of the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ (Margaret Atwood’s powerful and disturbing dystopian view of the Western world), Harvey Weinstein of course, and the backlash to Donald Trump’s election resulting in the Woman’s March in January 2017 and #MeToo, it raised consciousness of women around the world. I think women are aware of how fragile women’s liberties are and that these freedoms can be easily revoked with a regime change, history shows us it can happen. we have seen So bearing in mind the fact that since ourselves through the male gaze, with the collages I put the naked bodies next to commercial branding and slogans I harvested from fashion magazines. In 2015 as part of a group exhibition in the 56th Venice Biennale, l decided to subvert the male gaze, and so reconfigured a well known Beer label with an image of a male nude with an erection.

Mother Of All Things

Women Cinemakers It was a painting I had made in a life class, the male model in question regularly became erect, we, mainly a class of women ranging from the ages of 30 -80, would, out of politeness, look at our shoes or clean our brushes until he gained his composure But one day I got tired of waiting and drew his erection. After all I thought, it’s a normal physical reaction, it’s life, most of us wouldn’t be here in this room without it. I had this particular beer company in mind because in their commercials they chose to use a women with a post coital orgasmic voice with paint running down her face as she extolled the virtues and qualities of the beer. So going with the associated tropes, I collaged images of branded accessories that would normally be automatically associated with women’s imaging in a magazine. My beer label was renamed, ‘ which was the strap-line for an article featuring the latest Ferrari. I used glimpses of the top of the range cars and watches and exhibited a large bottle of said beer with my label on it. I also printed t-shirts with the same image and asked male and female viewers if they would wear the t-shirts (given the content!!) and let me take a polaroid of them, they were also asked to write a comment about what they thought of my new branding, on the polaroid. The best comment was from a group of young Austrian women who totally got what I was trying to communicate… they wrote “Dear Sooz thank you for your penis!” which was brilliant and hysterical. Another interesting comment came from a male teenager he was like Wow is that a …..Ferrari? ie, the latest model, he’d recognised it even though in the photo composition I’d only used just a sliver of the body work. He hadn’t even seen the penis! It was a very interesting and entertaining project.

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So yes sometimes the collages can be hard hitting, sometimes playful, but subliminally always political. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch take this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing ', however in the last decades there something ' are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? I have been fortunate to have fallen in with a curator who is also a friend, Vanya Balogh who’s doing a lot to bring a large number of London artists together in small and large scale shows. Before him I funded my own shows, but generally it’s difficult being a minority, the art world and the commercial world have only just begun to take steps towards presenting a more diverse world. Although I have noticed that black art tends to mean African art and there is still very little recognition for people who don’t strictly look African or who weren’t born in Africa. But the last Turner Prize was won by a mixed race woman but again she had a direct connection to Africa, though she has lived here most of her life. Regarding my view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field, I think more artists are taking this route because the parameters of being, say, just a painter or sculptor are too confining. I think today’s audiences get stimulated by so many things, as I said before, that art has to vie for their attention. For me conflating ideas, creating a hybridity is kinda part of my identity and that’s probably why I’m drawn to it., My identity is neither one thing or another. People who are mixed race are starting to feature in the media but when I was growing up I

was a rarity. I was literally deemed as exotic and didn’t have anyone I could identify with. Now there is a new generation of mixed race kids or should I say Bi racial as the Americans say? They are being sold as mainstream now, so that’s progress. I think artists like Tracey Emin, who is commercially successful, was probably one of the first women to use a range of platforms. She uses film, constructions, paintings, craft work for her blankets, neon text, many materials, so I think she’s set a precedent, women may find one medium is not enough for them. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Sooz. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? The 3 minute trailer of The Red Line is still touring with the group show Empire II with my brilliant curator friend Vanya Balogh. It will feature in Tallinn Art Week in Estonia in June, Paris in October, then Mexico City next year. Presently I am working on a book inspired by a trip to India I made a couple of years ago. I would also like to make another film, this time on the myth of Medusa. I continue to perform my poetry and will be self publishing a book with a couple of artist friends of mine, Jude Cowan Montague and Julia Maddison. I also think its about time I had another solo show and will be working towards that this coming year. It’s been a total pleasure to be interviewed by you for WomenCinemakers magazine - thank you. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Ginger Liu Lives and works in London and Los Angeles

I Have Lost Myself are the words spoken by Doctor Alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first diagnosed patient with Alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s disease. When my mother was diagnosed I became her full-time carer. The Manchester School of Art MFA Photography multi-channel video and sound installation, I Have Lost Myself is a powerful and disturbing compilation from 300+ videos, depicting the raw and honest portrait of living with dementia and the blurring of artist process. I Have Lost Myself documents the daily rehearsals and technical experiments of Give Me the Key, filmed daily over thirty days for a future live art performance. What unfolds is the colliding of performance and the every day as the artist slowly loses her sense of self. I Have Lost Myself is a powerful and disturbing statement on family relationships and responsibility, where art and the every day inevitably collide.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Ginger Liu is an American born, English raised, visual artist of Chinese descent, specializing in photography and moving image. Her work

investigates the intersections of memory, identity and performance. Ginger has traveled the world and lived in numerous cities and currently divides her time between London, Los Angeles and Liverpool. Hello Ginger and welcome to : we would like to introduce

Women Cinemakers you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and after your studies in Photography and having earned your B.A. (Hons) of Contemporary Media Practice, you nurtured your education with a M.F.A. of Photography, that you recently received from the prestigious Manchester School of Art. How did these experiences inform your current practice? Moreover, how would you describe the influence that the relationship between your Chinese roots and your cultural substratum due to your life in the United Kingdom have on your general vision on art? Ginger Liu: Since the age of 15, I have wanted to be a photographer and filmmaker. I gained my core skills in analog, darkroom, and composition at photography college. I was obsessed with American photographers’, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman and the European avant-garde. My mother’s love of Hollywood cinema and my father’s American education in Shanghai, together with my birth in Los Angeles, fueled my interest in American film and literature. I moved to London for University and studied film practice and theory, video, digital imagery and photography. When I moved to Los Angeles, social media, blogging and digital content was in its infancy and I embraced it in all my work. I worked in the film industry during the day and photographed live events in the evening. It was here where my love affair with the Hollywood burlesque and cabaret community began and continues today. Over the last ten years, I regularly photographed burlesque shows at Hollywood’s Monday Night Tease, as well as the Hollywood

Women Cinemakers Burlesque Festival and other cabaret acts around Hollywood. Eventually, I invited these performers into my studio to create the Burlewood portraits. It’s an ongoing project which will include moving image. I didn’t produce work about my Chinese heritage while my father was alive. Only years later in Los Angeles did I write about my father’s influences in The Johanneans. This was a multilayered investigation into my father’s upbringing in Shanghai during the 1920-40s and family life in America in the 1960s which included photographs, video, audio, archives and a travel memoir of a reunion and road trip across China. My aunt has been a big influence in my career and continues to be my source of Chinese family history. For my M.F.A. at Manchester School of Art, I turned the camera on my family history in Los Angeles, Liverpool and Shanghai. My self-portrait series, Saudade: American – Look at Me I’m Sandra Dee, is a series of composited identities lost in nostalgia and cheated Hollywood dreams. Dear Noni and John is an audio reading of more than 100 letters, written from my aunt in Liverpool to my mother in Los Angeles during the 1960s. I Have Lost Myself is my graduation film. It’s an experimental accident which is part performance, part art practice, part documentary, diary, confession and emotional nightmare. You are an eclectic artist and your versatile practice ranges from film and writing to video- installation and artist publications, revealing the ability of crossing

from one media to another: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme?

Ginger Liu: I have been a photographer for many years, and I’ve always used writing to work out the creative process and life’s obstacles. I started writing as a job when I moved to Los Angeles. As well as photographing everything, I wrote about it too. In art practice, experimentation can lead the artist in surprising directions. For instance, with I Have Lost Myself, that began as a performance. I’d been studying acting and movement and I wanted to

convey the multitude of emotions which people with dementia, their family and carers go through, which trained actors can expertly do with facial expressions. I filmed myself rehearsing acting emotions and this became the film. The whole process was completely experimental, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s raw, and I love that. Of course, those methods arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t suited for other types of work which need a more formal structure.

For this special edition of we have selected ,a captivating experimental documentary that our readers can view directly at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the collision between Art and the Everyday is the way your research addresses the viewer to inquiry into the nature of your artist's process.

Women Cinemakers When walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us what importance did have the schedule process of your performances? Did you conceive the video as a whole project? Ginger Liu: I Have Lost Myself is an accidental film.The initial project was a live performance constructed around a repeated demand, caused by Alzheimer’s disease. In the earlier stages of my mother’s disease, when she was slowly losing her independence, she would demand the door key so that she could leave her home. I had taken charge of the key for her safety but she couldn’t understand why and she would demand the key, repeating,“Give me the key,” for hours on end.This was extremely difficult to witness and the demand stayed with me. I wanted to show a side of dementia which is much more than memory loss. My professional development included acting for film and TV workshops, so that I was trained in moving my face through a multitude of emotions. In January 2017, I developed the 30 Day Key Project, where I rehearsed acting to camera and experimented with camera and lighting technology, location and POV, every day for thirty consecutive days. There were days which had scheduled practice and others which just went with the flow of the mood I was in. Acting powerful emotions is exhausting and some days where better than others. But I needed that thirty day

Women Cinemakers framework to push me and get things going. At the end of each night, I wrote notes in my film diary, but I didn’t look at the rushes. After the thirty days, I took a random look at what I had produced and made a thirty minute edit and this rehearsal, this artist process became the final project. It was the overlapping of not just mother and daughter, mother and carer, but of mother and artist. At first, I struggled with myself to show it publicly because as a photographer, I’m a perfectionist and this experimental rehearsal art process was not filmed perfectly or recorded perfectly because it was never intended to be a film. You see, even now, I’m stating that for the record. I’d shot so much, that the edit took four months. But what was good about the editing process was that I saw myself in a bad situation and I knew that I didn’t want to be like that again. Essentially, the editing process was therapy. is From a visual point of view, elegantly composed and we have particularly appreciated the way your sapient use of close ups allows you to capture emotionally charged moments: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? Ginger Liu: The research process is always the fun bit and I already had an idea that I wanted to fill the frame with my face mimicking my mother’s emotions.

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I was particularly influenced by Carl Dreyer’s, The Passion of Joan of Arc. It is arguably one of the greatest acting performances on screen and Dreyer experimented with camera angles and POV. It’s a silent movie expressing universal human emotion. He wanted the audience to feel the emotions of Maria Falconetti’s Joan of Arc. And likewise, I wanted my audience to feel what it’s like to be on the receiving end of child-like emotions which change with the wind. I also looked at Laszlo Neme’s film, Son of Saul, which is set in a Nazi German extermination camp about a Jewish prisoner who works as a Sonderkommando. It was shot with a shallow focus so that the scenes of horror taking place behind Saul’s tortured and focused face were blurred. For a similar effect, I used a portrait lens, one which I’ve used on burlesque performers, to isolate my face from my surroundings. Any movement would pull me out of focus, so I drifted between sharpness and blur which mirrored both my mother’s and my own experience of living with dementia and memory loss. I think that filmmakers who were trained photographers are a unique sub-genre.We instinctively know about composition and lighting and we’re not afraid to mess around with focus. are the words spoken by Doctor Alzheimer’s first diagnosed patient with Alzheimer’s disease: it's important to remark that you encounter

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with the theme of dementia when your mother was diagnosed and you became her full-time carer. How did this dramatic experience fuel your creative process? Do you think it provided your artistic research with some special value? Ginger Liu: I think I was in denial about my mother’s illness in the early years. I would work in Hollywood, shooting glamorous performers and artists as a form of escapism, then visit my mother and hope that somehow she wasn’t really ill.The more I looked after her, the more I realized that I couldn’t invest my heart and soul into anything but what was right in front of me. I wanted to make a film about my mother’s dementia without her being in the picture. That was my starting point and the reason why I decided to perform as my mother and the research took me from performance art to American monologue, video art and video diary, essay film and documentary, artist film and experimental. The editing was the real creative process for me because here I could express my experience of living with dementia by how the scenes were put together. Triggering the spectatorship's perceptual parameters, walks them through an intense and at the same time disturbing experience. Also, the incessant sound commentary of spoken words

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provides the video with such an uncanny quality: were you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? To research a personal narrative out of the flow of the images? Ginger Liu: Audiences who have experienced dementia personally, recognize what the film is about.They’ve experienced the repetitions and demands, and especially the mood swings.They also recognize how hard it is to care for a loved one and how difficult it is to watch memories and identity disappear. The demand,“Give me the key,” stuck in my head long after my mother could no longer string a sentence together. It was such a powerful metaphor for her loss of identity and independence. She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have the keys to her own home. These demands would be repeated for hours, and it was difficult to distract her. As you can imagine, it drove me insane.The performance I created is equally that of my mother and my response to her. My initial intention was to produce a durational performance where I would repeat these demands over eight hours, in part to show people what it is like to live with someone with dementia. Give Me the Key was written and performed multiple times and in multiple ways. I researched American and British spoken word and monologue performers, as well as durational and

Women Cinemakers

repetition performance art and played around with dialogue in my own performances to camera. It was important that the demand statement would be stuck in the viewer’s head until it pissed them off. This was my reality. is central in your artistic The theme of research. We daresay that memory is a track that everyday life's experience leaves in our inner landscape: however, memory does not perfectly mirror reality. How do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your process? Does perceptual reality play as a necessary starting point for your creations or do you think that creative process could be disconnected from direct experience? Ginger Liu: Both personal and collective or cultural memory can play tricks on us. We tend to use major historical events as signposts to our past, this is also true of any historical program. My family lived in Los Angeles in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War and protest, flower power, and civil rights movements, yet my parents have never commented on any of these things, their memories were of providing for family and the everyday stuff of life. My portrait series, Saudade is a time mash up about nostalgia and place. I was born in Los Angeles but raised in a small village in Lancashire,

England.Throughout my childhood, I longed for the LA my parents described in their Kodak color photographs and the sun bleached locations I watched on television. Saudade explores the life I may have had if I grew up in LA and the Hollywood cultural influences of the times. For example, Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee, is the title of a song in the movie Grease. I was obsessed with John Travolta and the movie in the 1970s. The portrait is a composite. I shot on location at Venice High School, where the exteriors of the school were shot in the film, and I wore a vintage pink prom dress with 1980s hair and make-up because I was 18 in the 1980s and I would have gone to the prom if I was living in America. As you can see, memory and time are completely messed up. German photographer Andreas Gursky once stated that "Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something." As an artist deeply concerned with themes belonging to the inner sphere, do you agree with this statement? Ginger Liu: I think it’s difficult to debate what is and what is not considered art. A photographic image or a painting is more than a representation of a reality and documentary is just as subjective as fiction. Isn’t contemporary art essentially about what is beneath?

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Over the years your works have been showcased in a number of occasions, including your recent shows at Manchester’s Holden Gallery, Liverpool’s Look International Photography Festival, London’s Photomonth, Los Angeles’s Think Tank and Perfect Exposure Gallery. Marina Abramovic once remarked the importance of not just making work but ensuring that it’s seen in the right place by the right people at the right time and one of the hallmarks of your approach is the ability to address the viewers to question their own cultural and perceptual parameters. So before leaving this interesting 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 decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of medium is used in a particular context? Ginger Liu: I don’t take in to account audience reception during the making process because it would change my work. If artists are constantly following what’s trending, what’s popular, they will never make anything that is true and original. Of course the flip side is that we all need to make a living and it is important to get our work out there.We have to be publicists and promoters,

business developers and networkers. I’m often asked why I didn’t work with some of the big dementia organizations when I was making, I Have Lost Myself. And my answer is always, because they would have changed it, diluted it and turned it in to something that wasn’t truth for me. But this is a personal project and not a commission. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Ginger. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Ginger Liu: I am making a film which celebrates the life of my mother. Using the framework of the essay film, I am creating a portrait of my mother’s life in Liverpool and Los Angeles before her diagnosis of dementia. I’ll be utilizing an interdisciplinary approach using photographic stills, personal and community archives, found and filmed footage, analog and digital film and photography, audio, dramatized reenactments and not limited to virtual reality technology. I plan to have Marilyn Monroe as my An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Inkeri Jäntti Lives and works in Oulu, Finland

Photography and videography are based on the illusion that reality can be bent endlessly to serve any goals. My focus with photography and videography is to tell stories and illuminate hidden or unspoken things. I often work with femininity, women and the representation of women in our culture. I am not afraid to call myself a feminist. My work explores inbetween places and the loss and discovery of identity. The ambiguity between isolation and personal freedom fascinates me. I’m inspired by cinema, music, abandoned places and nature. With my art, I’m asking for trouble but I’m also ) searching for a peace of mind. ( An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant Nipangersimaneq is a captivating experiemental video by Finnish photographer and producer Inkeri Jäntti: inquiring into the theme of sexual abuse she initiates her audience into a highteneed experience capable of encouraging a cross-pollination of the spectatorship. Featuring elegant cinematography and sapient composition, Nipangersimaneq challenges the viewers's perceptual parameters, providing them with a unique multilayered visual experience. One of the most captivating aspects of Jäntti's work is the way it explores in-between places and the loss and discovery of identity. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her captivating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Inkeri and welcome to : your practice is marked out with effective synergy between Photography and Videomaking we have really appreciated the way your approach combines these media with such consistent aesthetics. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit http://www.inkeri-jantti.com In particular, we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oulu University of Applied Sciences: how did this experience inform your current practice? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum influence your aesthetic choices? When talking about my education, I think I have to say that

studying at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences was more of a practical education than anything else, especially when it comes to visual media with a deeper purpose, so to say. When it comes to creating art, I would say I’m self-taught. My education focused more on technical aspects like how to set up lights in a studio and how to edit. I wouldn’t belittle any of these things, they’re extremely important and my years at OUAS taught me a lot of how to produce many different types of content. I also specialized in media production, which means that I have a producer’s training. I think that’s been very important to my career in very “boring” ways, meaning I’m now very used to making budgets, applying for grants and scheduling my work. And that’s priceless. I think my studies gave me more in ways of being selfreliant in my work and also knowing that creating art was what I want to do, even if it’s not an easy or necessarily lucrative career. My school was very focused on students doing and finding commercial work and while I know the value of having a steady job, I learnt that for me, it’s important that I do something I feel passionate about, even if it might mean I’d never have a regular paycheck. This is very direct, I think, but we Finns are quite direct about these kinds of things. And being an artist or doing creative work, I think it’s something that you do just because you can’t stop doing it, even if you know it probably will never be a “safe job”. So talking about money or making a livelihood, or knowing that you might always be poor is just part of the job description, I’d say. we have selected For this special edition of , a captivating experimental video art 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 insightful inquiry into and what traumatized women go through is the way your work provides the viewers with with such an intense

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Women Cinemakers visual experience, enhanced by elegant composition. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell what did draw you to focus on this theme? The focus of Nipangersimaneq is the sexual trauma and more specifically, what it feels like to experience sexual trauma and all that comes after that. I went to the art residency in Nuuk, Greenland, having already chosen this topic. For a while I’d wanted to do a project about this, as long as I can remember I’ve considered myself a feminist and I have personal experiences about trauma. In that way, my project in Greenland was very personal. I’ve also always been a big fan of popular culture; be it books, comic books, movies, TV shows etc and I’ve grown into the knowledge that women are represented in quite a twisted, one-sided way in our popular culture. I wanted to do something else. I guess that’s a big part of why I’ve grown into such a vehement feminist. In my Greenland project, I wanted to illustrate what sexual trauma and it’s after effects feel like. The idea of the video was actually sort of accidental; I went into the project thinking I’d only take photos. Then I met the woman who tells her story in the video and I remember being really captivated by her voice. She told her story really well, her voice is soft but also in a way so matter-offact, in such a shocking contrast with what she actually says. Listening to it, I started thinking that this needs to be heard, this needs to be experienced. The visual ideas came later, at first I could just imagine in my mind’s eye an image of woman screaming in rage. I wanted to create something beautiful to lure people into the story and then shock them when they realized what they were listening to. I hope that experiencing the dichotomy of a beautiful visual - and even if this soft, beautiful voice speaking - and then being struck with what women

experience would sink it deep into people’s minds that this is what happens to women all over the world and this is how horrible it feels like. And I hope that the next thought the audience has is: “Well, how can I help? What can I do to stop these things from happening?”. The visual themes in the video came from my time spent in Nuuk. I saw a lot of crows every day and the months I spent there happened to very snowy ones so I was often stuck inside. I followed and photographed the crows a lot and was fascinated by them. I also read a lot about Greenlandic mythology and in that - like in so many other mythologies - crows and ravens are very complicated creatures that can travel between the realms of life and death. I feel women are also seen as somewhat similar creatures; we’re something that can give life but we are also feared; our power is feared. Why else would women have been oppressed all this time if not for the fear that we could not be controlled? So I wanted these three raven-like women in the video, the three of them also representing the Furies. In a way imagined them being a vindictive, avenging force that come to punish rapists. I read about a lot of myths during my time in Greenland and being always so close to the nature and getting to know the local myths and traditions, I wanted to imagine a modern, supernatural justice, or something that might - and should have been a part of mythology. All over the world, there are many types of god-like figures and there definitely should have been creatures that come for those who hurt women. We daresay that in the words of a woman telling the story of what happened to her in her childhood is equally important as the images that you combined and we have highly appreciated the synergy between the stillness of some parts of the footage and the rhythm of spoken. How did you structured the relationship between sound and gestures for ? In particular, did you aim to

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Women Cinemakers communicate an uncanny sensation to the viewer, by combining images and such persistent audio commentary? I suppose I already got into this answer in my previous one, but yes, I wanted the rhythm in Nipangersimaneq to be very narrative and shocking. I wanted it to be painful but also empowering. Something that trauma victims often go through is this battle with anger and rage; can you feel anger? Do you have to blame yourself for what happened? How do you express anger? You often feel helpless and numb after sexual trauma. I wanted to create something that was really very, very angry. And something also very powerful. The women in the video are strong and angry and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s glorious. Your art practice also touches on societal and cultural issues and we would like to invite our readers to visit http://kunst.gl/the-silence-of-friends, where they can read a atimulating essay that you wrote. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, " ". Not to mention that almost everything, could be considered political. Do you think that could be considered political in a certain sense? What could be in your opinion the role of artists in our everchanging, unstable contemporary societies? Moreover, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? I do think Nipangersimaneq is definitely political as it touches on rape and sexual abuse and in a larger sense, the treatment of women as commodity and other. Rape and incest are big issues in Greenland but I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t choose Greenland to somehow highlight that hey, Greenland is so bad. This happens all over the world. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m from a country that is notorious for its suicides. This project and this residency just happened to come at the same time in my life. Only after I offered this project to the

residency I started reading about sexual abuse in Greenland. It was quite horrifying, but at the same time as I read about what many women had gone through, I also realized I read about really strong women. I went into the project and to Nuuk with the idea that I am telling the story of women, from a woman’s point of view, and I am one of these women that has felt herself sexually victimized. Of course it’s not as simple as that, even if I share my gender with these women, I am still white and to them, I look like a Dane. Denmark and Greenland have a long, complicated and very dark history. I don’t know how Greenlandic women see my project or how they felt. The women I interviewed were all amazing, kind people and I felt kinship with them. It was important to me to also share what I had experienced because I was asking them to tell me about things that had hurt them. I wanted us to be on even ground but thinking that, it’s quite naive. I have white privilege and there will always be things I cannot see because of it. I never wanted my project to be exploitative, but that’s not necessarily something I can decide. I think artists and people who create culture have a responsibility to be careful of what they say. Visual medias like video and photography still, even after all this time of photoshop and After Effects, have this illusion that what is shown, is real. That it reflects reality and it can often be difficult to learn that it actually reflects only what the people creating it want it to reflect. So, when you create art, I think you have to take stand. Considering something like movies or TV, if you have the power to decide what is shown, that power comes with responsibility. It's important to mention that you have started to get to and its idea of know the Japanese concept of finding beauty and peace in imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence. What does fascinated you of this concept?

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers I think wabi-sabi fascinated me most because it felt very merciful. In this world where everybody is just running around like crazy and there are so many demands on you, wabi-sabi felt like this peaceful place that said: “You’re fine as you are.” It’s not a way of life, it’s an old Japanese aesthetic that is in fact very complicated - I don’t pretend to understand it - but to me the message was that of acceptance. Visually I connected it to non-places that have always fascinated me. Places like abandoned houses, old forests, places that seem to have been forgotten by us and taken over by nature. These places feel outside of time and have this bittersweet quality that in my mind’s eye felt the same as the idea of wabi-sabi. As you have remarked once, you are fascinated by To emphasize the need of a bound between creative process and direct experience, British artist Chris Ofili once stated that " ". How would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a body of work and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? I would like to say that I’m quite spontaneous in my work, or that I don’t plan much, but it’s pretty impossible to say, in the end. I think my method often is, when I plan a “staged” visual, something like gathering materials that I think will suit, just throwing them in and seeing what comes out. It doesn’t sound very methodical but in my work I think one big part is the choosing of what you decide to publish and how you present it. I often take photos just for fun, I get genuine pleasure out of finishing a photo with my computer and putting it on Instagram, for example. Sometimes if I’m feeling depressed or anxious, I look through my old shoots, pick an unused photo, touch it up, publish it and feel better. I have a very dear friend who often

models for me and she still often jokes about the one time I just gave her a smoking stick - we were both standing in a lake in summer - and told her to “just do something”. We got really great photos from that set. I’d had some ideas before that shoot but I rarely have a clear idea in my head of what I want. Sometimes I do, sometimes I can draw it on a paper before a shoot but that’s also sometimes less fun. If you get that exact shot that you drew on the paper, it can feel a little bit boring. Your draw inspiration from a variety of themes, ranging from abandoned houses to survival stories: how do you consider the relationship between perceptual reality and the realm of imagination? Moreover, how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? I like to do a lot of what I’d call “mindfuck” photos. I’m sorry for the dirty word, feel free to edit it out or replace it. These are photos where I play with architecture and perspective, with these photos I’d like to subtly question reality. I’ve done this a lot with my sister, who is an experienced aerial acrobat and can do a lot of things with her body that not everybody can do. And of course these photos are usually manipulated to make them look impossible. To me, these photos belong in the same category as many non-place or abandoned places photos I take; I feel they symbolize this quest for self, this ambiguity between what you want to be and what you should be. Lot of these themes come from personal experience of having struggled with finding my own identity while being constantly barraged with many kinds of ideas from the outside world. Elements from environment play a crucial role many of your artworks and we like the way you have created such insightful between the envirnment and the references to human body in . How do you structure the relationship

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers between your characters and the environment where they are immersed? This answer would tie a lot into my previous answer; I like to put people women in places that represent some kind of inbetween. Often the women are between something, struggling with something. One part of it is wanting to tell women’s stories, wanting to show women as people with agency and also heroes. The women in my photos may not always be happy or powerful but it’s their story. They’re the main character. And the environment to me, or staging a photo, is about putting them in a place that represents some kind of inner struggle. With abandoned places, I often feel they’re outside of society, or they show the degradation of what we’ve built into this society and its expectations. I love the idea of how nature claims back abandoned places. To me, nature represents a return to what you truly are. I don’t believe modern times and human inventions are bad, I believe more something like that we’ve built a horrible fake world with our expectations and existing outside it would be incredibly freeing, would be something where you could truly discover what you are. These questions are a matter of life and death, which I think is the reason I use a lot of quite “grim” things sometimes, like human bones. I’ve taken many photos where I look at mythology and especially the mythology of woman being death and rebirth at the same time. I think that’s incredible power to have and I like to tell stories of these mythical women and how they own their power. Often in mythologies and legends the story is told from a man’s point of view and a woman symbolizing death and the ability to create life is dangerous and scary. I’d want to tell the story from the woman’s point of view. Sometimes, everything in life can feel like a matter of life and death.

Your photographs often deviate from standard photorealism to develope the true potential of the images that you capt Photographer Thomas Ruff stated that " ". What is your opinion about the importance of photography in the contemporary art? This is a hard one! It’s also hard to answer because I don’t have a formal training in art photography. Photography, to me, has always been kind of the bastard child of “real” art; it’s so documentative that it’s sometimes hard to look at it as art. When does it become expression? Today, photography is everywhere and personally I feel it most in how I conceptualize my photography. As it mostly exists on a computer and in a virtual space, it feels limitless to me. In my mind, I can draw connections with photos taken in the same set and I see them as a whole. Often, when I print photos I start to really dislike them or they become flat. They stop existing in this space with no end where they can continue outside the frame. It’s an odd thought. In a way, I like creating video more because video is like a story that you’re peeking into, that exists outside that limited window. Photos can sometimes feel limited. Over the years your works have been internationally showcased in several occasions, including your recent exhibitin at the . One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to establish direct involvement with the viewers. 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? I try not to think about the audience too much. I have the tendency to edit and question myself endlessly and I think that if I went down that road, nothing would ever be ready or published. In a way I believe in

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Women Cinemakers “the death of the author”, the audience will see what they see and they obviously have the right to. Sometimes, talking about my work with strangers can open up completely new ways of looking something I’ve done. I love finding symbolism in my older work that I didn’t really realize was there. In this also the choosing of what you represent becomes very important; sometimes you see things in your photos afterwards that you didn’t really see when you were creating them and in this way the story actually unfolds only after you’ve taken the photo. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Inkeri. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? At the moment I’m waiting for what comes next. Usually a theme will emerge and carry me for a few years and then another one will come. Recently I’ve been more proactive and scheduled in deciding what I’ll do; recently I did a photography exhibition about the women in my family and really enjoyed it. It was very different from my other work, I usually do very fantastical, cinematic things but this project was about taking documentative photos of my relatives. But it was a sort of a “happy” project after working with such dark themes in Greenland and it reached a completely different type of audience. Exhibiting my family’s photos, I met very different types of people and got feedback from a very different point of view. Another thing I hope is coming up somewhere in my future is doing a feature film. It’s probably long time coming, but that’s what I’ve kind of been dreaming about for decades. I’ve had a kind of an idea and pieces of a script lying around and I hope that the right time is coming for me to work on that. I know scripting and movie-making is a really, really long process but that’s where I’d like to go next.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant

Women Cinemakers meets

Minyung Im Minyung Im (b. Seoul, 1987) is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her early photography work focused on unnoticed, hidden and forgotten spaces and people, the gaps between our daily lives. Repurposed structures, artifacts of unseen moments, people lost in the city her photos find the stories and small formal beauties that our distracted, abstracted minds censor on a daily basis. After studying photography in Chung-ang university, she received the Mirae award from the Geonhi art foundation and Canon Korea. Since then she has worked with photography, video and performance, exhibiting and distributing in galleries, public spaces, film festivals and internet channels. Much of her recent work has been in collaboration with migrants, including Filipino workers in South Korea and North Korean diaspora, exploring human consequences and social reactions to migration. She also works as a curator and educator. Currently she lives and works in the UK focusing on human rights issues in North Korea. Her work has been presented in shows throughout Europe and South Korea including Kunsthalle Erfurt(Germany), Seoul Museum of Art(South Korea), Hangar(Spain), La GĂŠnĂŠrale(France) and Jubilee Library(UK). Awards include Seoul Photo Festival Portfolio Award (2011), Busan International Video Art Festival (2012), Art Council Korea's Public Art R&D Project(2014), Grants for the Arts from Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture(2015).

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

You have a solid training and you hold a B.F.A.

and Dora S. Tennant

of Photography and related media, that you

womencinemaker@berlin.com

received from the College of Arts, Chung-Ang University: how did this experience influence

Hello Minyung and welcome to : we start this interview with a couple of questions about your background.

your artistic evolution? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to the relationship between your Korean roots and your life

Women Cinemakers between United Kingdom and your native country address your artistic research? Hi, thank you for selecting my work for your special edition. I studied photography as a medium of visual arts, rather than photography for its own sake. When I make new work it often carries elements of photography even if it’s not printed or still. For example, I made a series of videos called “O minute”, filming people on the street being static for one minute as if in a still image. I moved to the UK from South Korea in 2014. Living as a foreigner is not easy, but often inspiring. I’ve always been interested in things that reside in-between. Before I came to Britain, I made a short film with Filipino migrants working in South Korea. Now I understand them better as I also don’t have an obvious place that can be called “home”. I am lucky, but it makes me think about people forced to cross borders to survive. Marked out with such captivating multidisciplinary feature, your practice include photography, video and performance, revealing that you are versatile artist capable of crossing from a media to another and we would like to invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme?

Women Cinemakers To be honest, I don’t consciously select a medium for a new project. The starting point tends to dictate the medium. Many ideas come from questioning conventions; “Do I need to feature my own work in my solo exhibition?”, “Are commercial films better than personal videos on YouTube?”. I recently did a solo exhibition which was a collection of videos found online from various sources. I also invited a famous Korean YouTuber to do a Mukbang (filmed eating session) in the gallery space. In this case you could say the entire “exhibition” was the medium - it felt different from curation somehow. For this special edition of we have selected , an interesting video 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 your approach to narrative is the way the results of your artistic research provides the viewers with such a captivating multilayered experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea and what did you attract of this story? I was doing a residency in Hangar in Barcelona, Spain. I wanted to make a short film with a mannequin, perhaps as a kind of tribute to the Spanish film director, Luis Buñuel. One day, I smashed a glass in my kitchen and the broken pieces of the glass were scattered all over the

floor. I got paranoid walking with bare feet over this area, even after I cleaned it. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see any fragments, but I felt like invisible pieces remained. It always seems to start with a small thing that breaks the peace. This incident ended up forming the basis for the story - a girl who lives happily with a mannequin until one day a glass is shattered and things escalate. Elegantly shot features careful attention to blocking

with keen eye to details: what were your when shooting and editing? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? It was filmed by a very talented videographer, Camila Rivas Sanchez. We decided not to plan the shots in advance, and improvise the camera work with the dancerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movement. I wanted her to work intuitively, in a kind of collaboration with Montse Roig (the dancer). We decided to a use Canon 6D

Mark II camera with 35mm lens. The video has quite a cinematic quality, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very light and portable. We have been impressed of your film and it seems that you do not want to limit yourself to trigger the audience perceptual parameters, but that you aim to address the viewers . Are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the ? In viewers to elaborate

particular, do you think that the relationship between Luna and relationship a mannequin could be considered in our unstable contemporary age? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never been very interested in constructing a single consistent narrative within my films. Somehow that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t leave space for an active engagement while watching - it only feeds or comforts or controls the viewer. I do a lot of planning but I also allow things to take shape spontaneously, I tend to allow

Women Cinemakers narrative gaps and inconsistencies to remain during the editing. In this film, Luna is living in a “palatial house” which is actually a furniture shop in Barcelona - all the items in it are for sale. I left the shots of the owner working in the shop in the final edit. It’s a shop or a house, a human or a mannequin, a narrative film or a documentation of a performance. With mass information exchange, and a mass media, every part of reality has become narrativised - perhaps creating ambiguity is a means of resistance! We have particularly appreciated the way the sound tapestry by Daeil Lee provides the footage with such a penetrating and a bit atmosphere: how do you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see the relationship between sound and movement? In film, sound is often followed by visual to enhance “emotional impact”, to disambiguate a situation, or to set up a familiar atmosphere. I am very interested in the use of sound in video. This film was partly an experiment in process - the soundtrack was composed first by sound artist Daeil Lee and it was played back live while the dancer improvised. The camera crew reacted to her movement and the sound, as well. So rather than being there to manipulate the audience, the soundtrack was manipulating us as we produced the film. The production became a sort of collaborative performance.

Women Cinemakers

We would like to mention and , a couple of works from your recent production that are focused on , such a topical theme that has recently captured the attention of the international audience. When introducing our readers to this stimulating body of works, would you tell us how did your personal experience as a Korean citizen did inform your research? During my life in both South Korea and living in Britain, you hear North Korea mentioned frequently, but rarely do you hear anything that tells you much about the lives of those who live there. After I found out that there is a community of North Korean refugees in London, some were kind enough to meet and talk to me about their experiences. They seem so ordinary, but their stories left me speechless. Stories of people starving to death, people forcibly separated from their families, sexual abuse and trafficking even after their escape. Some people kindly invited me for food and I experienced North Korean food for the first time. In the end I found that food, and its links with so many aspects of daily life and emotion, was a good way to make a very personal video about individuals from North Korea. This is what I am working on now, “North Korean cooking with Soonyo”. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKNIhhuynVDMVM2 (h UkHn84-A). In it, Soonyo shares recipes and remembers her life in North Korea. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re

Women Cinemakers

in. It depends on the political system you’re living under". As an artist interested in the exploration of human consequences and social reactions to migration, what could be in your opinion the role of artists in our unstable, everchanging contemporary age? Does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? Yes, of course, there are many corrupt and broken systems that feed into each other that create these consequences. One product of the way we receive our media, is that everything is packaged into a simple story. The media represents North Korea as just another far-away, crazy state with a comical dictator threatening the world. It is repeated and narrativised and abstracted until it almost becomes a fiction. However, these images don’t represent the vast majority of people in the country. We may still say “oh dear” when we hear the news, but we don’t really understand what it means for those people whose reality it claims to represent. I suppose am trying to balance this, by focusing on individuals, the details of their every day lives, trivial and non-trivial, traumatic and comforting. To show a person other than simply a refugee or escapee. Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic once remarked the importance of not just making work but ensuring that it’s seen in the right place by the right people at the right time: how is in your opinion online technopshere affecting by the

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Women Cinemakers

audience? Do you think that today is easier to a particular niche of viewers or that online technology will allow artist to extend to a broader number of viewers the interest towards a particular theme? It’s definitely an interesting time in that there many online platforms to present artworks. Despite all sorts of side effects, I’m surprised that I feel rather positive about it. Yes, there is this vast amount of content being generated, and perhaps that huge amount of content does devalue/hide individual works. But I think I am happy for art to be devalued - it moves the focus from individuals to social/cultural movements, away from the egotism of the individual artist, perhaps. I’m also interested in how we can use online platforms unconventionally, rather than a simple “distribute and attract viewers” model. The North Korean cooking videos I’m producing at the moment have a fairly conventional form, but present recipes for foods that were used to survive famines - a big contrast to most of the aspirational online cooking videos. Over the years your artworks have been internationally showcased in several occasions, both in Korea and in Europe, including Kunsthalle Erfurt, Seoul Museum of Art, Hangar, La Générale and Jubilee Library: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to establish with the viewers: do you consider the issue of audience

Women Cinemakers reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of artistic language is used in a particular context? Yes, I think about where to present my work from the beginning. I prefer to keep my work as a whole - as much about the process as the result. The viewing of the work becomes the making of it. I once installed a cozy mosquito tent in a public park containing a video of mothers singing multi-language lullabies. It was summer in Ansan, South Korea, where many foreign factory workers live. People were invited to come in and nap. The installation becomes everyone and everything. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to make work that hangs on the wall like a dead animal. I feel a thrill when people step into my work and make unexpected changes. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Minyung. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thanks for the interesting questions, it was a pleasure. I tend to take one step at a time, but for now, I will be producing more North Korean cooking videos distributed on YouTube, and these will act as a basis for some future events. Including some cooking performances, perhaps with Soonyo. Sounds and smells. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Alyona Larionova Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

The video sets out in search of an image capable of, if not representing, at least interpreting the current complexity of total globalization and digital revolution. The overpowering presence of storage, organization, and information exchange systems in peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social and subjective life finds a metaphor in jazz improvisation.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Across Lips is a captivating experiemental video by London based artist, researcher and filmmaker Alyona Larionova: inquiring into complexity of total globalization and digital revolution she initiates her spectatorship to a highteneed experience capable of encouraging a cross-pollination. Featuring elegant cinematography and sapient composition, Across Lips challenges the viewer's perceptual parameters, providing them with a unique multi-layered visual experience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Larionova's captivating and multifaceted artistic production. : we would Hello Alyona and welcome to like to suggest to our readers to visit: in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production: in the meanwhile we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your

BA (Hons) in Photography, from the London College of Communication, you nurtured your education with a MFA that you received from the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art: how did these experiences inform your current practice? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum influence your aesthetic choices? When I was studying photography, all of my friends were filmmakers, and they taught me the technical basis of filming and editing and introduced me to some really great works of cinema. From that moment on, I knew that I wanted to work with moving image. With the help of my friends I did a few 8mm and 16mm films and enrolled into Slade School of Fine Art to study in their media department. At times it was very challenging, I was really new to art as a discipline and didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what it was that I wanted to explore. Once I graduated, I felt extremely liberated, and for the first time felt the direction I wanted to take. In my current practice, I pay less attention to the medium my projects take, but let the ideas themselves decide their physical forms. I also use my practice as an excuse

to dive into a vast array of other disciplines and meet and collaborate with a lot of exciting people. So far, my practice has taken me from the conservation labs of the Natural History Museum in London and its archives, to the bankrupt Spanish town of Sesena and Spanish national team of tightrope walking, to the remote Kazakh steppe, and to the Internet Archive in San Francisco. For this special edition of we have selected , a captivating experimental video art that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the current complexity of total globalization and digital revolution is the way your work provides the viewers with such a multilayered visual and audio experience, enhanced by elegant composition. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us what did draw you to focus on this theme? At the time, I was struggling with my newly acquired short attention span; by this I mean that I was constantly scanning vast arrays of information and failing to always grasp the essence of what I was researching. In a short stint of selftherapy, I read a book called â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Shallows: how the internet is changing the way we think, read and rememberâ&#x20AC;?. There was one idea that really stuck with me, an idea that perhaps, our supposed ability to focus on a single task represents a strange anomaly in human history. In fact, the natural state of the human brain is that of distractedness; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s anything but linear. Relieved, I got fascinated by the new mode of storytelling, stemming from distracted states and multitasking. Do these narratives always have open beginnings and endings? I got in touch with Professor Daniel

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Women Cinemakers Everett, who studied a unique tribe of Piraha for over 30 years. We discussed Piraha’s ability to embrace ‘living-in present’ ethos and the lack of the word ‘worry’ in their language. Then my attention switched to free jazz, another representative of being in the moment. The state of apparent distraction of jazz is by no means an attitude of forgetfulness, but rather a sign of musicians’ intense involvement with the performance. Then I made a U-turn and went back to my internet rabbit hole, and suddenly it all made sense to me! features elegantly structured composition: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? A lot of the times, the choice of camera equipment is guided but the given budget. In the case of Across Lips, I spent most of my equipment budget on one particular lens - Angenieux 24-290, which is commonly used for major sporting events and concerts thanks to its high magnification zoom. During the shooting, I wanted the camera to be like a needle, I wanted it to maniacally focus on various details at great speeds, somewhat mimicking the drumming. This lens allowed us to achieve this effect. Of course, I was also lucky to work with a young and very talented DP, Alex Grigoras, who came up with a vast array of technical solutions for my creative needs. At the internet archive in San Francisco, I worked with a steady cam operator to create a weightless and dreamy movement to counteract the aggressive and fast shots of the drummer. We have particularly appreciated the way you combined images and the jazz soundtrack created by Martin France: we daresay could be considered an allegory of our that everchanging, unstable contemporary age. How did you balance the combination between sound and images? In particular, did improvisation play a crucial role when conceiving or did you schedule every detail of the composition during the editing process? The sound plays an extremely important role in my practice. It is a

powerful tool that can easily affect the reading of the visual content. So in my work I try and make the sound an active protagonist. Martin France is an incredibly distinguished jazz drummer and I was very lucky to have had the chance to collaborate with him. The performance that you see in the film is a complete improvisation. The only element that was preconceived was the duration of each drumming session. The idea for this film occurred when I was reading two separate things at the same time: a New Yorker article on the Internet Archive and Sun Ra’s biography “Space is the place”. All of a sudden, I discovered a great deal of parallels and shared concerns between the two, and I felt that through juxtaposing jazz and the Internet, they could help make sense of each other.

Due to budgetary constraints I couldn’t travel to San Francisco for the shoot at the Internet Archive, so I created these freeflowing hand drawn maps for my steady cam operator to choreograph him through the space. Later on, in the editing room I paired up the shots of Martin’s drumming with the footage from the Internet Archive in a way that created an illusion of the two occupying a unified space. I see the Internet Archive as Martin’s headspace, his imaginary construct that he is trying to unpack by means of his music. The editing process is usually the most challenging, but also the one I enjoy the most. I think that this is the moment when the story starts unfolding and taking shape.

Your works often deviate from traditional video-making, to offer to the viewers an enhanced visual experience, through sapient use of the expressive potential of the symbols that you include in your videos. Especially in relation to modern digital technologies, what is your opinion about the evolution of visual arts in contemporary art scene? To answer this question, I’d like to quote Donna Haraway: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties”. Through

utilising certain metaphors and pairing up seemingly divergent narratives, I am trying to make myself as well as my viewer pay attention in the sense that attention requires knowing how to resist the temptation to separate what must be taken into account and what may be neglected. It’s difficult to summate the evolution of visual arts, as this is a hugely vast subject, with many books and publications devoted to its various aspects. Personally, I am fascinated with the visual art’s recent experimentations with other sensorial apparatuses, like smell and touch. To quote Ed Atkins' words about , "everything here is trying to decipher everything else": we like the way

you seem to urge the viewers to extract the meaning from your work. How much important is for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I would like my works to maintain as large a space for interpretation as possible. Since late 2015, I’ve been developing a series of works (Across Lips included) that call into question the very nature of storytelling and our obsession with certain narratives, that for too long have been and still are presenting us with a debased version of the world. What does it mean to tell a story, who is a story addressed to? What kind of storytelling can adapt to the technological novelty and also to the vastness of digital archives? With my work, I am trying to give voice to the stories that are otherwise told in the muted registers. I am interested in moving away from rigid narrative forms. Your work accomplishes such an insightful inquiry into the relationship between information exchange systems and people’s social and subjective life. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the system you’re living under". What could be in your opinion the role of artists in our everchanging contemporary age? Moreover, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? I absolutely agree with Orozco’s point. Moreover I find it incredibly pertinent. Living in the Western part of the world defines my concerns, my interests, and my worries. The contemporary art world is centralised around a select number of geopolitical points that define, according to some, cultural trajectories for the rest of the world. But can we really equate our Western maladies to the problems of the world as a whole? I’m not so sure. The lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one

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another, and these networks are very much localised and geographically defined. Recently, I came across this theory that perhaps one day the breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain certain events in strictly biochemical units. The human fictions will be translated into genetic codes, and maybe biology will merge with historyâ&#x20AC;Ś! Coming back to your question of being a female artist - I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like to define myself, gender terms included. However I also cannot ignore the gender inequalities that affect all professional fields, including the art world. It is undoubtable that being a woman influences the way you see the world, but my hope is that we can bypass the long history of humiliation and let their voices be as equally heard as any other person. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impressed us and that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled and it explores the delay that exists between modern world and our : British artist Angela Bulloch once remarked that especially in our media driven "a works of art 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 artists has changed over the years, with the total globalization and the new sensibility created by digital revolution? And how is in your opinion technology affecting the consumption of art? It is not so much that the role of artists has changed with the influx of digital technologies into our daily lives, but it is the tools themselves as well as their applications in artistic practices that have undergone a major transformation. I think the main problem we are facing right now, is that the digital revolution has not only introduced new forms of freedom and communication, but at the same time it significantly decreased the power of individual to interpret what is happening in the

world today. Across Lips talks about it in detail.The power of interpretation of the data and information we collect is in the hands of a small group of people. They offer statistical interpretations based on various algorithms, which in turn pretend to be objective and true, but are they? I think art has always protected us from the accepted rational of the outside world, and offered time and space to find new perspectives on things. The idea of art as a safe zone, gives hope and possibilities to reflect on things from a personal and critical positions, from within and simultaneously from outside the system. You have been recently shortlisted for Tenderflix Award in London and over the years your works have been internationally showcased in several occasions, including your recent participation to the . One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to establish direct involvement with the viewers. 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 decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? I count myself among the select few artists who believe that once the work is completed, it no longer belongs to them and the audience is free to interpret it in any way that pleases it. My work is very intuitive and often starts from a small hunch. Then it steadily evolves and progresses relying on chance encounters and conversations. At times, even I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what the finished work will look or feel like, and I like that. However, when I physically install my works in the exhibition space, my decision-making process is guided by the possible choreographies of the viewer: I create a path, intentionally obstructing or highlighting certain aspects of the work.

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Women Cinemakers Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Alyona. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? , Right now I’m working on a new video, whose title is borrowed from Donna Haraway’s most recent writing. It explores how we relate, think and tell stories through and with other stories. The film draws on the centuries’ old pact between the hunter and the eagle of the Kazakh steppes in order to try and grasp the postmodern idea of ‘touch control’, whose role is to maintain an orderly and coherent world in times of unrest. The film’s cast includes four unlikely protagonists: the hunter and the eagle, a judoist and a border control officer, who despite their different circumstances, offer us their own physical interpretations of the constantly shifting power scales today. Braided, three storylines begin to merge and in the end - it’s the questions the very nature of same plot. empathy - are we only able to sympathise with the ones we love and can touch? Borrowing on the uniqueness of the bond between the man and the bird of prey, this film will isolate and zoom in on gestural instances to observe power relations in the world, underscored by crisis of security and hyper connectivity. This is my most ambitious project to date. I filmed it across three countries, as well as developing an entirely computer generated animation scene. I am also really excited to collaborate with an immensely talented NY based musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, who will compose the score for the film. I sense that my work is slowly moving in the direction of the film medium, in a classical sense of the word. However I don’t see myself ever crossing over. I like being in-between. In that way, I treat storytelling as something that is much more than a narrative device, but a physical, tangible material. Next year my new film will be presented as an audio-visual installation among various other sculptural objects.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Fernanda Bertero My research grows between the contrasts of man and his naturally artificial identity, and is materialized between those same contrasts, from painting to video art, generating customized techniques for each project. My interest is to capture the mechanisms and forms with which technology transforms us, so that these processes become more conscious and facilitate their reinterpretation. Technology influences human identity by inscribing it in a society that develops towards technolust. Reinterpreting can generate more human and natural relationships between man and technology. In addition, aesthetics plays an important role for me, it evolves with man and each style represents an ideology, so playing with the relationships between the symbology of an aesthetic and its temporality, highlights the contrasts of my work . There are theoreticians and artists who influence my ideas; Werner Heisenberg explaining how technological innovation alters our thinking patterns, Francesca Alfano investigating mutant identities, Walter Benjamin showing how attention, art and play can free our plasticity, and artists; Vivian Cooper, Pierre Huygue, Barbara Kruger, Pierre et Gilles, etc. My process is born from an undiagnosed disease, and the piece I create is the result of searching a cure.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

training and you achieved a B.A. in Visual Arts that

and Dora S. Tennant

you received from the Academy of Fine Arts, in

womencinemaker@berlin.com

Bologna, to where you moved from your native

Hello Fernanda and welcome to

Quito, Ecuador: how did this experience influence

: we would like to introduce

your artistic evolution? Moreover, how does the

you to our readers with a couple of questions

relationship between your cultural background

about your background. You have a solid formal

dued to your Ecuadorian roots and your life in

Italy and in Spain inform the way you relate yourself to art making? Hi WomanCinemakers! When I moved from Ecuador to Italy was the first time that I knew how did being a foreign felt like, and since then i have never stopped feeling like that. When i came back to Ecuador, i was another person from the girl that left 7 years earlier, so this state of foreiness has always been a motor in every part of my art making. Even if i have a lot of different concerns, ideas and art practices, in the end everything is about human identity, and what i feel as important to me is less about specific countries with their past and roots, and more about human identity as a territory of mutations and its future. Certainly growing in Ecuador made me really sensible towards nature, at first in a literal way, when i started painting i used as subjects lots of amazonian animals and plants, but then all of that just got me nearer to our own nature, human nature. You are a versatile artist and your practice is marked out with such captivating interdisciplinary approach that allows you to range from film, mixed media and video art. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit https://www.lafiebrevisual.com in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you tell us what does address you

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers to such captivating interdisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme? I have always been really curious towards plenty of things, so for me choosing art was exclusive enough. Certainly discovering a medium’s nature and developing a good techniche takes time, so i have learned to work with each of the medium i know by giving them a lot time and also letting curiosity drive me to the next thing that i should learn. While this process was still quite unconscious to me, i read two things that made it clear and encouraged it even more; The classic ¨The medium is the message¨ by McLuhan and ¨Plasticity, and the Sculpturing of the Self ¨ by french philosopher Catherine Malabou. Both of this authors made an important contemporary point, while McLuhan said that the medium you use to communicate a message is the message itself, Malabou said that our brain and our identity have an inner plasticity that lets us sculpt our own self. So, after having the right words to describe what i believed and felt, my multidisciplinary process became my profession and passion. Now i am sure that the only real concern about having so many paths/mediums you could use to develop an idea, is that it takes more time to really know which is the right medium. When i was a painter it was easier. What makes me choose is analyzing how other artists have communicated similar ideas, reading about the topic and

finally, most of the ideas i have are images at first, so the way they came at me at first has a lot of importance, intuition is the root. For this special edition of we an intersting video have selected project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/236411879. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the ouroboros between Man and Technology is the way the results of your artistic research provides the viewers with such an unconventional visual and sound experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us what did direct your attention to this theme? I believe that what made me conscious of our relationship with technology was our daily lives and how they get more and more dependent from technology. There is also the fact that in my personal art process i began in a really traditional way (painting, sculpting, etc) and when i started working with digital media the change was sudden and almost total, so even if i really wanted and want to work and know about technology, i noticed that it had so many bipolarities and complexities. I also noticed changes in my ways of doing and thinking since i submerged in technology, and the fact that you start forgetting about your body by being captured by such an

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers immersive media. So, certainly the root of technolapse is the insane relationship that i see between humans and their machines, or is it Â¨machines and their humansÂ¨? . We have deeply appreciated the way the idea of technology through an archetype of the processes of mechanization: multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced remarked "that a works of art continues to evolve after it has been created, because it is conceived with an element of change". Technology can be used to create innovative works, but innovation means not only to create works that haven't been before, but especially to recontextualize what already exists: 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 have always seen an artist as someone that has to really be in the now, and make commentaries and reflections about it, to really feel and analice the now in other to make other people notice or be conscious about something that otherwise they wouldn't. I am sure that this perception or definition is quite personal and shared at the same time, maybe it's more about the kind of artist that i want to be. But what i really know is that the more history we have, so the more time passes, we accumulate more of everything (images, events, machines, techniques, etc), so the question rises; Âż Is it necessary to create brand new images in a world full of them?.

Women Cinemakers

Today it's no longer necessary, we are in the remix era, where recontextualizing is a healthy art practice, where contrast and memory create new ideas and landscapes, art today is more about the links and relationships you create more that the object itself. So i believe that the role of the artist has changed over history, but mainly, the fact of commenting and interpreting reality has always somehow been there. The fact that today we have the appropriation, the remix, the college and others, is just an effect of artists being aware of the nature of our era, at least, that's how i feel. Among your source of inspirations you have mentioned German theoretical physicist and pioneers of quantum mechanics Werner Heisenberg, in reference to his view on how technological innovation alters our thinking patterns. We daresay that new media will make stronger the bond between art and technology in our media driven contemporary age: how does in your opinion technology affects our perceptual and cultural paramteres? In particular, how is in your opinion technology affecting the consumption of art? I read somewhere that thanks to social media humans feel nearer to all the events that happen in the world, as if we could feel it all in our own skin. But this fact also makes us thick-skinned, as a normal

reaction for being bombarded every day with so many information. So we perceive more and feel less, we process more and react less, just like computers in the end. I believe that we are becoming more minded and perceptual beings, and less physically, active beings. Moving into the macro, the culture is always more about the individual and the virtual way of culture. We have been changing towards a unification or homogenization of cultures towards a global one. So culture is progressively expressing more of itself through the digital platforms and its virtual interactions, towards been less in the streets and more in the screens. From my point of view technology makes us or our vulnerability makes us believe that saying what you think in a post is being part of something, instead of doing and being part of something for real. So culture grows in the screens and tribalization grows in the streets. As Art is part of culture, it is also getting more virtual, ephemeral and vulnerable. We consume Art while going to work in the morning through our screens, we consume Art everywhere through any screen. All of the fast changes of technology, to me, aren't always evolution, but the certain thing is that they change reality and humans may adapt, or ÂżAre you a robot?. So art is melting with the rest of information through the internet, and somehow more and more artists or self called artists arise, and

Women Cinemakers art isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t an elitist side of culture anymore, you have it or a copy of it anywhere at your iphone screen. So to me, technology gives a hole another universe of possibilities to art and the ways it is consumed in a lot of positiven ways, but we cannot say that it doesn't takes away also a little bit of its magic, everything is a Ying Yang, more possibilities and more risks. Rich with references to symbols and objects belonging to universal imagery, Technolapse and its allegorical quality urges the viewers to draw from their cultural substratum to elaborate personal interpretations, addressing them to evolve from a condition of mere spectatoship. Are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I have tried to see what i do through other people's eyes, i could never swear that i actually done it, but i also been really curious hearing what people actually have to say about it. So, what i have found is that generally the seed is my work is understood in the same way but the general narrative and details are described and felt directly from person to person. Then, talking more about the intention and less about the facts, i do care about delivering a message, if not i would do something more abstract or

extremely conceptual made only for artists and academics. To me is important to talk to humans, and that's why i also studied art direction, to know how to talk to everybody, or at least try to. I try to find my own equilibrium between wanting that my art is understood and making and honest piece. In the end, my art is really opened, i feel comfortable hearing alternative stories and personal interpretations, my work is also about plasticity. You are also a musician and we couldn't do , your music project without mentioning that our readers can get to know at https://www.facebook.com/Biotrashbanda: we have been particularly fascinated with the way you combine up-to-date technology - as your use of Arturia's devices - with captivating sensuous quality regarding your singing performance. While introducing us to your Biotrash project, would tell us what does address you to direct a part of your artistic research through the media of music? I don't remember the first time i singed, cause i never stopped when i was a kid. As an adult, after studying visual arts and getting more technological, I spontaneously started to play with softwares like ableton. Also i never stopped singing, and while becoming more and more visual i started to feel the need of my performing self, of my body.

Women Cinemakers

Two years ago i bought my instruments through the idea of performance and plasticity, so i bought a tc helicon that lets you loop and filter your voice and instruments and an Omnichord, that is an electronic harp made for children. In music, instead of reading a really intellectually knowing things as i know in visual arts, i prefer to be more intuitive, and then correct things if necessary. Music is something that i want to totally feel, and then perfection the lyrics wich also talk about my visual arts topics, which actually are nowadays human topics. I find that music expresses what i cant express with images, so this two sides of me complementate each other. Sound plays a crucial role also in your videos and we have really appreciated the minimalistic still effective sound tapestry that provides with such an ethereal atmosphere capable of highlighting the dichotomy between Man and Technology as well as unexpected points of convergence: how did you conceive the combination between sound and the flow of images? Been coherent with what i have got to say is the link between sound and vision. So half of the sounds with which i made Technolapseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sound design are the sound of the same objects you see, as the typewriter and the blind. And the other half of the sounds are digital popular sound as the ones of Windows and Nokia, and also somo voice and omnichord effects to give a general vive.

Women Cinemakers So it was also really important to me, from a conceptual side, to make people hear those sounds the have heard thousands of times but putted in a different context, to really show the interruption they make, and how that interruption can make ridom and that ridom can make music. You are present in several 'virtual spaces' of the web and it seems that you are particularly interested in sharing the results of your artistic research to a wide audience. Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic once remarked the importance of not just making work but ensuring that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seen in the right place by the right people at the right time: how is in your opinion online technopshere affecting the consumption of art by the audience? Do you think that today is easier to speak to a particular niche of viewers or that online technology will allow artists to extend to a broader number of viewers the interest towards a particular theme? Just as a fact, I haven't been able to put Technolapse in a massive platform such as youtube, because it is at plenty of festival right now, and they all don't want you to have it publicly online while the festival is on. So, i have just posted and promoted fragments of it in social media, and it has been important, more people that like what i do have become my audience since then. Certainly technology can bring people with similar tastes and thoughts together. This is one of the bright sides of our technological reality, you can reach a worldwide audience with your art.

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Women Cinemakers Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? My artistic experience has been bipolar, i have found really good opportunities and also discouragement towards the unconventional fact of being a latino american woman and artist that doesnt talks nor about latinoamerica neither about being a woman, or at least not literally. The gender and nationality facts have always been a double edge knife. Innerly, for me, the fact of being a latino american woman is beautiful and full of energy, but in artistic contexts i been asked things like; ¨¿Why don't you put a little of your roots in your art?¨ or ¨¿Do you know Frida Kahlo, she knew how to be a latin american artist¨ , or ¨¿Why aren't you showing your body in your video performances?¨ or ¨The colours in your art are so Pop, i wouldn't have guessed that you where latinoamerican, you are also a Red hair, ¿how did that happened? ¨ So, from all of that questions I have learned that is not something obvious to expect for a latin american woman artist to build her artwork through identity and technology in a multidisciplinary way and in a pop and retro futuristic aesthetic, i am not what people expect, that is it.

Women Cinemakers

But also, many times, me not being a cliche has had i really good effect in my life, and the more time passes the more liked my art gets, so i feel that the contemporary world is getting wider and out of the cliche. And this is also thanks to a feminization of the world, and of the arts. There is not a perfect equality between men and women in any field yet, but we are getting there really fast now and with great woman that make mind blowing stuff. Woman are natural multitaskers, we are made to work between and through fields, and that is just what is happening right now, there are more and more quality multidisciplinary women artists. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Fernanda. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Right now i have been trying to melt together the idea of video art and music video, so the next thing that's coming is a music video of one of my songs called Â¨UmbralÂ¨ wich in english means threshold. Also, talking about thresholds, i am oil painting again, and preparing some pieces that are more about the medium it self.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

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Women Cinemakers meets

Bahar B. Faraz Lives and works in Sweden My works take a critical and at the same time personal view of social, political and cultural issues. In my works, I challenge my gender, the rolls that society has been imposed to me as a woman and as an Iranian. I challenge the social norms from a female point of view. I try to understand my body and use is in a therapeutic way to conquer the difficulties that I have experienced in my life. AUTHENTIC is an attempt to show us that we are all original no matter what. ( )

An interview by Francis S. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Marked out with such a captivating crossdisciplinary approach, artist Bahar B. Faraz's work deviates from traditional trajectory to operate in the field of visual arts with a particular focus on video performance to take a critical and at the same time personal view of social, political and cultural issues that affect our unstable contemporary age. Featuring both elegance and insightful criticism, Faraz's challenges the social norms from a female point of view, as well as of the urgent themes of sustainability that affects our media driven contemporary age. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to

her captivating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Bahar and welcome to

we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You are basically self-taught and we have appreciated the way your practice include a variety of media that ranges from photography to painting and video, and before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit https://vimeo.com/user12073585 in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production. Are there any particular experiences that did address you to such multidisciplinarity?

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, 2017, video performance Length: 4 minutes Material: Stamp and ink

Moreover, does your cultural background dued to your Iranian roots inform the way you relate yourself to art making in general? Hello and thanks for having me. I use art and more specific performance as a way to communicate with my surronding. I have a message, an idea or an experiment which I eager to talk about not only in words but also with different media, so art is my language and different media are the alphabets. In my point of view each idea needs to have the right medium in order to grow and develope . This opens the door to multidisciplinarity. Sometimes I need to use different media in order to conduct my ideas and thoughts. I also have to mention that maybe the multidisciplinarity has its roots in me being a self-taught artist. I have never had academic education in art so for me is like trial and error. I use different media and I try to find those which are the closest to my vision of practicing art and I feel comfortable with. Nowadays I feel really comfortable with performance for example. For a couple of years ago I though I was a video artist but then I realized what I called video art is somehow documentation of my performaces so I stopped calling my self artist. I am a narrator and I use different media to complete my narration. I left Iran to continue my education when I was 26. I randomly chose Sweden and I should say I have never regret that choice. But living in Iran for for the first 26 years of my life I have been shaped and somehow defined by iranian culture and iranian norms. This doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily mean that I accept or approve the

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Women Cinemakers

norms or the culture blindly but unduobtly it has itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traces in how I define myself as a person and eventually it reflects into my art practices. For this special edition of selected

we have

, an extremely interesting video

performance 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 insightful inquiry into the notion of identity is the way your work provides the viewers with the elusive bond between the real and the imagined, combined with such a captivating visual experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of

, would you tell us how do you

usually select the themes that you explore in your artworks? The themes come from the daily issues that occupy my mind, the things that make me thoughtful, my concerns. The themes are really close to my heart otherwise I can not visualize them. It can be a simple feeling or a complex result of research and readings about a topic but at the end each of them will be presented by visual elements. Being a woman, an immigrant and Iranian has been inspired me alot. It is like that these different agencies provide me with variety of themes that I want to work with. The interesting thing in my point of view is when these agencies merge in one theme , one idea, for example in

“AUTHENTIC”. In that performance i challenge the uncertainty inside me as an iranian woman , so two of the aganecies that I named above are merged to one. In “AUTHENTIC” I try to get a voice or to creat my own voice by approve my own authenticity, why should I wait for someone else to do it for me? The ongoing stamping act is silent protest against all the attemtps making me fitting the mold. “ AUTHENTIC” comes from my frustration of chasing the “perfection” according to the society’s definition. Ofcourse “AUTHENTIC” is a personal narration which has its roots in my anger and frustration but art is a conductor. I show the viewer how I feel and my feelings may or maynot be aligned with the viewer’s feelings and personal experiences. We have deeply appreciated the way

subvert

the idea of the make-up commercial: from Caravaggio's epoch to our unstable contemporary age, art has always conveyed sociopolitical criticism. We could quote Orozco's words stating that " ". What could be in your opinion the role of artists in our everchanging contemporary societies? In particular, how does cultural issues influence your work as an artist? we don’t live in isolation and uncounsiouly we are affected by the social and political systemsfrom we are living in. But Artists have a choice. Artists can practice art as a personal reflection or they can engage in political and social aspects of life. I believe it is a

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personal choice and in my point of the view none of those choices are superior to the other one. You choose to engage or not in a same way that a citizen choose to vote or not. And I believe it would be naive to think that we are immune against the changes in our soicety which can be conducted by chaning in the social and political systems. When I started practicing art I did not make any choice, I just practiced cause art for me was and still is the emergency exit of the dailiness of life. But after a while I realized that although my practices are personal and there are some kind of teraphies helping me understand myself , there are also influenced by the cultural, political and social issues. It took me a while to realize that what I want to talk about is actually influenced by the society I used to live in or the one I live in currently. Being a woman and considering my background helps me to have a personal understanding of changes around me and I have made an active choice to consider theirs influences on my practicing. We have deeply appreciated the way your practice challenges the superimposed

: for more

than half a century women have been discouraged from producing original artworks, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women on the art scene? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value?

Women are finding their voices in art , it has been a long process and it will be a long process but we have already seen lots of original awareness among women artists. The awareness about female body and objectifying it as an commidity has already been pointed long time ago in Barbra Kruger’s and also Gurilla Girls’ works. But I personally belive that there are a wide variety of topics that has not been touched yet for decades and now women artist starting challenge them. Women are gaining power and learning to use the power as a tool for evolving which is really important nowadays. We should not forget #metoo which showed the world the power of unity of women. I believe future of women’s art will not be a silent protest about unfairness anymore. Women are taking an active role in society and will not be satisfied by just being seen or being heard. We are after imporvment and for imporvment we have to act. We can not satisfy ourselves with “Your body is a battelground” anymore, although I love that work and admire Kruger. In my point of the view women are changing the passive role to a more strong active voice. I have been inspired by Kruger’s work and her courouge is admirable for being a femenist voice in 1989 (the time of the battelground work). But as a woman myself I found it not sufficient enough to reflect what I experince now. That is the reason I did the performance “ I am not your battelground”. The performance includes a series of statements which I choose to say. Statments which take the concern further than the female

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Women Cinemakers

body. In that performance I not only mention my body but also mention “ my background, ethnicity, color, desire, hopes, wishes, past, future,sexuality etc. And end each sentences with “ Is not your battelground” which gives me the awareness. What I mean is that it is not about the female body anymore, it is about our identity. So answer to your second question is that I wouldn’t call my gender as a special value reflected into my practices but I would certainly call it a different and maybe wider prespective which help me to see and hopefully understand life in a different way. We have deeply appreciated your elegant to create a kind of involvement with the viewers that touches not only the emotional sphere, but also and especially the intellectual one. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that " ": how do you consider the relation between of the themes that you explore and of creating your artworks? I describe the path from the idea to the physical act as a two sided street with lots of traffic. There is no one way from idea to performance and you can not reach the destination without knowing the start point. So mostly I consider the idea (the theme) as the start point, I have to polish it in a way to get a clear picture of what I want to say. Then I start walking,

choosing my path, making mistakes, changing the path but the origin is till the idea. The actual performance is my destination but not necessarly the final one. And sometimes the whole relation is like a loop, an idea, the performance, the new idea which leads to new performance. I belive in visualization, maybe because I visualize everything for myself. The idea is the soul but we need the flesh to make the idea tangiable. For me the flesh is ironically my own flesh , for another artist can be sound or color etc. To emphasize the ubiquitous bond between everyday life's experience and creative process British visual artist Chris Ofili once remarked that " ". How would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a performance and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? Ah, if you asked me this question for one year ago my answer would be that performance should be planned in details. But I learned it- in a hard way- that as an individual we do not have control over every single detail of our own performance. What I believe now is that as a person practicing art I should have a clear vision of the concept and idea. That is ofcourse my responsibility and I should have controll on it. The idea must have been polished in a way that the artist feel comfortable with it and gradually the idea become part of the body .This clear vision is my compass during the performance and help me to find the path. Ofcourse I can not controll everything during the performance but by haveing a clear vision I can compromise in some kind of smart way.

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I like improvisation and I think it is kind of ability that an artist gains when he/she is really comfortable with the theme. So Improvisation is neccessary for a creative mind but we have to draw a vivid line between improvisation and chaos. Sound plays an important role in your works and we have been fascinated with the effective combination about the images and

of the ambience in and of spoken words in . How did you structured the relationship

between sound and gestures in your works? In particular, did you aim to suggest such an uncanny sensation in the viewer? I like using sounds in my works cause it gives another dimension to my works. But it is also valuable to mention that the active choice of not using sounds can be as valuable as using it, and it is the same when we use other visualization elements. When I plan â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as much as I can- for a performance I already have an idea about using or not using the sound. For me sound is not something extra but it is part of visualization, it is a vital part of the work and without it the work wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be complete. It is a mysterious relation that I have to sounds. Maybe it has its roots to the fact that I try to teach myself to hear, to become more sensitive to sounds around me, maybe because I love singing. And for me sounds like the rest of the work is a conductor leaving my mind in order to reach the

viewers mind. How viewers experience it is their personal experience but I never use sounds just to give certain effect. As you have remarked in the ending lines of your artist's statement, you consider yourself : do you think that Art could be considered regarding the recurrent

that

affects our unstable and everchanging societies? Definitly. We may forget or be caught in dailiness of life but there is always one part of our existence that can not be satisfied with what the modern society has to offer. I believe every human needs a way to express him/herself. Maybe it has its roots in our desire of becoming eternal, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. People can choose different ways to express themselves but for me art is the way to travel inside my mind to a safe place which I can feel safe, I can feel myself home. Art is my salvation and it helps me to find balance in my daily life and it makes my existence meaningful but it may work for others or not. There is not only one prescribe of course. What I want to say is that we all seeking balance in our life and this rapidly chaning society doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make it easier for us to reach this goal. That is why we need to find our safe spot, some people do sports, some cooking foods , some doing meditation and in my case I practice art. When I practice art I become another persone, I am really nervous before every performance and sometimes I get really anxious but as soon as I start my performance I become calm, a deep relax feeling that remains for couple of days , I am so

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers focused that I don’t hear anything other than the voice in my mind. The whole experience gives me so energy that keep me charged for couple of days. Well it is not maybe proper to say but I get high of doing performance, some kind of stamina for me. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Bahar. Finally, would you like to tell our readers readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you for having me. Well the future won’t be so complicated for me , I keep practicing art , and I hope during my practices I can evolve as a person. I may find interests in some themes or ideas which I have no idea about right now but that is the beautiful part of the life. Nowadays I am really intreseted in rituals and combining it with self-recognizing. That is the origin or my performance “selfonizing”. I have no idea what the life will be in one year but as long as we talk about art and practicing art I am really optimism and open minded. So my plan is keep working, keep practicing ,keep doing mistakes and keep learning from them, keep evolving, keep getting stamina. I should also mention that I appreciate any chance that I can get for practicing art in a professional way so if there is some oppurtunities please do not hesitate to contant me. And one last word , never give up no matter what people say we are all AUTHENTIC in our own way. An interview by Francis S. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Taylor Yocom Lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, USA My video work uses the gender performativity (to draw from Judith Butler) of female niceness as a jumping off point for exploration of gendered injustices and harassment. Using a sickeningly sweet aesthetic, I speak to this social phenomenon using the language women have traditionally been given – flowers, patterns, and an overload of pink. We are taught to smile and nod. We are seen as the comforters. And we say ‘’sorry’’ too much ‘’and um this really isn’t a big deal,’’ don’t we? Femininity is equated with niceness. Niceness is synonymous with being constantly agreeable. Niceness is not speaking your mind. Niceness is possessing low self-confidence. This schema of femininity creates a world in which women must fight to get heard, to push back against harassment and microaggressions. My moving images and installations demonstrate tension in response to this dynamic through uncomfortable moments dripping in pink. A teapot keeps pouring. The cup is spilling over. The cake never makes it to the plates. The flower petals are violently chopped off. Yet, the trope of the performance lingers. A cheap satin curtain is always in the background. A laugh track reminds us that this is all pretend. This is all a performance – but what exactly is the performance? Through exploring the gender performativity of female niceness, I call attention to how femininity is constructed to keep us behind.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Taylor and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with

a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your BFA of Photography from the University of Iowa, you nurtured your education with a MFA in Visual Art, that you are currenty pursuing in Washington University: how did these

experiences influenced your artistic evolution? Moreover, how would you describe the influence of your cultural substratum on your general vision on art? Thank you for these kind words! My formal training has been extremely valuable for my conceptual and technical development. Recieving a BFA in photography has solidified the understanding of lens based media – and during my MFA I’ve taken a deep dive into feminist theory and experimented with a variety of media. Of course, I am influenced and inspired by popular culture - the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, memes, scrolling though social media, to name a few. I am constantly reading and discovering new artists – a few that I take deep inspiration from are Lilly van der Stokker, Martha Rosler, Laura Owens and Miranda July. You are a versatile artist and your practice is marked out with such a captivating multidisciplinary approach that allows you to range from Photography and Works on Paper to Video and Installation. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit http://www.tayloryo.com in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme of your artistic research? Thank you! I am completing my MFA in Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. This program is

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers interdisciplinary and my work has moved from primarily being collages and photography to including sculptural installations and video. My artistic research spans painters, photographers, and video artists. My conceptual research is grounded in feminist theory and current events. I take inspiration from a variety of sources to create a work in a form that makes sense for the content – I typically shied away from sound work, but I realized that having a phone programmed to play me saying “no worries!” on a loop made the most sense for a certain project. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected lol sorry i'm being like totally a garbage person!, a stimulating performance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed directly at https://vimeo.com/236846805. What has at once caught our attention of your insightful inquiry into the pressures of hyperfemininity is the way you approach conveys both humour and a sharp eye on the constructed female identity. When walking our readers through the genesis of this project would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? I am so glad that my favorite parts of this piece stuck out to you! The idea came about when I was growing into my overload of pink aesthetic and cake kept coming up in unexpected places – or maybe I was noticing it too much. Its such a loaded yet versatile symbol and object – so i

wanted to do something with it. I thought of how women are typically the hostesses. I thought of how women apologize for things that aren’t their fault. I thought of the funny, self deprecating humor that millenials have cultivated and wanted to create a performance based work with this sentiment – one that masks the larger problem. The video looks at the breakdown of emotion work (coined by Arlie Hochschild – the work of suppressing or performing emotion) done by gender. I’ve noticed that in my relationships –and the relationships of my friends and peers – the woman does the comforting, the man benefits, and when it’s her turn to vent, she’s dismissed. And there’s research to support this! I wanted to create an insanely pink and funny look at this – something that on the surface seems like a quirky video with boings and slapstick humor, but when you stick with it, there’s a melancholic narrative. lol sorry i'm being like totally a garbage person! evokes a caustic, still realistic vision in our contemporary, still patriarchal societies. Over the recent years many artists, from Martha Wilson to Carolee Schneemann have explored the relationship between the culture’s expectations about what women are supposed to be: not to remark that almost everything could be considered political, do you think that you practice could be considered political, in a certain sense?

interview

Women Cinemakers

I think that this is a very insightful look at my work and I couldn’t agree more. In the past decades, so many battles for gender equality have been won, but we still live in a patriarchial society. My work deals with the gender performativity of female niceness – a term coined by psychologists Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick. I think that the pressures and expectations for women to be nice is silencing. I see my work as political in the sense that it speaks to this prescription’s expectations and consequences. Your works are rich with objects rich with evokative quality: cakes, flowers' petals and cups of tea, all belonging to universal imagery: how much importance do plays symbols in your practice? In particular, are you interested in creating allegorical works capable of reflecting human condition in a wider sense or do you think that your practice is strictly circumscribed to gendered injustices? This is an interesting line that I’m walking with my work – as I would like any viewer to get something from my work, but my main focus is on these gendered injustices. My strategy is to use these universal symbols and make them pink. Like, so much pink! Then, the feminine (albeit coded and stereotypical) is impossible to ignore and it forces the viewer to contextualize their associations with the objects with how I am framing it.

Women Cinemakers We daresay that your approach is centered on the ability of making the viewers aware of the urgence of the themes that you explore: how do you consider the issue of audience reception in relation to your creative process? What do you hope to trigger in your spectators? I think that this question is closely tied with the previous – I want a wide audience to access the work. As I am in the planning stages, I strive to draw from personal experiences or cultural events and make it widely relevant. I want a viewer to be able to feel that they have been there – or that what I am referencing is important to notice. In her well-known Semiotics of the Kitchen, American artist and performer Martha Rosler inquiried into the taken-for-granted role of happy housewife as an ubiquitous sign of women's harnessed subjectivity: did you draw from this specific imagery for your works? Moreover, do you think that social pressure is functional to our patriarchal societies? Do we need to reset the current system of values in order to build a society where women and men have really the same rights or do you think that our current system of values could evolve towards an 'acceptable' situation? Semiotics of the Kitchen was definitely in the back of my head as I was creating lol sorry i’m like totally being a garbage person! There is something palpable about a woman’s anger and frustration expressed in this way that hovers between abrasivity and humor. I wanted to access

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers that in my work. This is a really important question and one that I don’t have a definite answer to. In my work, I’m illuminating these quiet moments of niceness that have larger implications. Just like how the #metoo movement shed light on a larger issue by allowing people to speak about experiences with a simple phrase, I want my work to draw attention to how women put up with so much and put on a happy face. Because that’s nice and women are supposed to be nice. Like, just because she smiled and laughed it off doesn’t mean she’s not super uncomfortable with a comment or gesture – and I want my work to expose how these niceties (among other power imbalances) prevent women from speaking up or contributing their opinions in some scenarios. The idea of niceness means “putting up with it” is absolutely ridiculous and I want to call attention to this idea to dismantle it. Marina Abramovi once remarked the importance of not just making work but ensuring that it’s seen in the right place by the right people at the right time: how is in your opinion online technopshere affecting the consumption of art by the audience? Do you think that today is easier to speak to a particular niche of viewers or that online technology will allow artist to extend to a broader number of viewers the interest towards a particular theme? Yes! The internet is so important to my work. First, I like to draw from meme humor and culture – hence the “garbage

person” reference. Being able to draw from online references and then cultivate an audience through social media is hugely important to my work. I love looking at work by net artists and I see so many who strategically and successfully use the internet as a medium. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Yes! This is so important. I see so much hope with women artists and makers – just seeing the success of “Lady Bird” is so inspiring. Women’s stories and experiences are important and deserve to be made into art – by women, and on their own terms. One of my favorite books, Heroines, a nonfiction work by Kate Zambreno unveils the struggles that modernist women writers faced – and how often times they were silenced by their husbands or institutionalized. Although it’s not contemporary art, this book was so important for me to see how these issues I’m

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Women Cinemakers passionate about have played out in history and how Zambreno gave a voice to these women. I love being an interdisiplinary artist and am very fortunate that I am in an environment that supports this exploration. With the internet and discourse on women’s issues, I am optimistic about other interdisciplinary women artists’ success. However, the gender gap for artist representation in galleries (among other issues – such as sales and other forms of representation) is a huge hurdle to overcome. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Taylor. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you for taking the time to develop these thoughtful questions! I am currently working on a mixed media (cardboard cutouts!!) video installation called for the nice girls in shows by bad men. In this series, I’m identifying moments of female niceness in TV shows and films directed, produced, or written by men who were outed or discussed in the #metoo movement. The videos are in the same visual language as my other works, and in these works I attempt to destroy objects associated with the scenes I identified. I use these to pay homage to the female character – the ‘’nice girls’’- in these shows. I see my work paying more attention to specific cultural references and getting more and more pink. I am excited about the future of my work!

Women Cinemakers meets

Alexandra Holownia Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Art is like universum withaut border I am fascinated by utopian visions of the world related to the right to self-determination, women's equality, protection of the environment, and animal rights. a portrayal of a world undivided by inequality, nationalism, or religion.The new hierarchy of the world undermines the traditional practices in art. I'm interested in universal topics. I investigate what connects and what separates individual nations, because all people, despite the differences, have something to do with each other. That's why I am inspired by the ballad of John Lennon Imagine, going beyond age, culture, religions, human races and everything else that keeps people apart. Art have only sky, with no restrictions as to sex, age and origin. If, as a result of globalization, nations are approaching each other, is there a universal concept of art? Can art for all mean the same? Also, since several years as a performance artist, I been involved in the project of Aleksandra Fly www.alexandraflyartproject.com -https://performance-crossings2.tumblr.com/post/172885990051/alexandra-holownia-pl, showing me as life sculpture who calls for a break with the tabu of female sexual organs. So quote All people will be Brother from Ode to Joy written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785. The Ode is best known for its musical setting. "Ludwig von Beethoven" in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony completed in 1824. Breaking with tradition. modified on All people will be Sisters (formulated by the author Luise F. Puschs) matches my artistic actions. One of my video from the performance Art to You participated in the Gesamt project by Lars von Trier, presented at Kunstalle Kopenhagen 2012 and at the international film festival in Gรถteborg and Locarno 2013. Other video films of my authorship participated at the Video Art Festivals in Video Container Milan (2010) and Magmart in Naples (2008/9).

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Rejecting any traditional classification regarding its multifaceted nature, the work of

multidisciplinary visual artist Alexandra Holownia triggers the viewers' perceptual and cultural parameters, offering a multilayered visual experience. In the body of works that we'll be discussing in the following pages, she walks us through the liminal area in which perceptual

Women Cinemakers reality and the realm of imagination find a consistent point of convergence: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and captivating artistic production. Hello Alexandra and welcome to : we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: after having graduated in Interior Design from the Academy of Fine Art in Poznan, you nurtured your education the field of Stage Design, at the Academy of Fine Art Warszawa, and you later majored from the University of Art in Berlin: how did these experiences of training influence the evolution of your artistic sensitivity? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to your large number of travels direct the trajectory of your artistic research over the years? I have to say that since childhood I've been fascinated with creating illusions in theater and cinema. I liked fairy tales and theatrical productions introducing viewers into the world of fantasy and- dreams. I was also fascinated by the colors, the light of the stage, and, of course, the actors who played the reality invented by the artists. I grew up in a communist country. I wanted to study film, but I lived in Poznan, which only had a high school of art and music. I chose to study as an interior architect because I wanted to create shaped spaces. Later I completed postgraduate studies in scenography at the Fine Art Academy in Warsaw outstanding Polish creator of the visual theater of

Women Cinemakers Jozef Szajna- he taught the author's theater received from the point of view of the sculpture. Having lived in Berlin, Germany I carried out various art projects financed by the city of Berlin Neighborhood Management and the Senate. It so happened that I won three open calls and I was able to provide art to residents for three years, becouse in these project was going about how bring art to public.At the same time, I worked as a foreign editor for art magazines in Poland. I was also co-founder of one art magazine. At that time, Poland probably had the most art magazines in Europe. Each University in Poland issued its own magazine. This is no longer the case. The work as an editor and in publication of artistic magazines contributed to familiarity with numerous theories in art as well as helped provide introduction to other artists. Of course, the Art in Context study at the University of Art in Berlin has refreshed and updated my concept of art. Learning is important, because the world is moving forward and technology is developing. The social point of view is changing, political and geographic situations are changing, and art is changing. For example, today it is difficult to reproduce old video cassettes and DVD is already out of circulation because internet downloads or links to Vimeo videos are used. In 2015, I worked as a performer with the French choreographer Jerome Bel, who developed a new theater method. He broke with the perfection of movement and mixed professionals with amateurs. Bel's performances have a social meaning. They taught me that in art is an

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Women Cinemakers with New York artists: Louise Bourgeois, Denis Opentheim, Christo. I asked all the artists I met what is art ? And this is a difficult philosophical question. The answers were fascinating. I even published a book in German “Artist Interview as a Method of Art Education”. In the “Kommunikations Kuss“ video I decided to ask passengers in the tram about the definition of art. Generally I draw inspiration from films. I'm also a film critic and for 15 years, I have cooperated with the International Film Festival Berlinale. During an artistic journey I compare the film’s reality to the world around me. For example, once in Rome I visited Pier Paolo Passolini's park in Ostia and I compared this place with the Abels Ferrara film “Passolini“. While I was in Barcelona I took a private flight to Santiago de Compostela to experience the trip made by Christina the hero of Woody Allen's film "Vicky, Christina, Barcelona. Babelsberg Park in Berlin or the Cinecitta Studios in Rome are my favorite places. I just like the aura of a dream factory. Recently, the film “Candelaria“, from director, Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza, inspired me to make artistic works about the subject of old woman as sex symbol. Eros and Thanatos are the main motivations of my work. We have appreciated the way you involve people from ordinary, daily to interact with the meaning of a work of art: how do you consider the

relationship between direct experience and your creative process? Does daily life fuel your creativity? I like art actions in public space, which are easier to obtain for installations and projects than galleries and other regimental spaces. But I also did what was once forbidden. I showed art in places where no art is expected. In this way, I wanted to interest random viewer in the art. During the implementation of my project “Night of Wishes” in 2004, financed by the Berlin Senate, while looking at my plastic colored heads flowing on the Spree river, Elzbieta Stasik, the editor of the RBB multicultural radio, said “the next strange action could be on the tram..“. Ah, I thought great. I'm on the go all the time so the idea to make a tram a place for performance appealed to me. Disguised as a Polish cleaner, I rushed into the M10 tram running between the districts of Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg as students, tourists and various other people traveled. I was interested in what art is for them. Passengers willingly talked. No one was surprised by this strange question from a Polish cleaning woman before May 1st celebrations. There are many crazy people in Berlin. Everyone on the tram was having fun, even the controllers stopped checking the validity of tickets. I was also amazed by Berliners respect for the simple cleaning worker I played asking the public what art is? I had already routinely posed the same question in discussion

Women Cinemakers

during interviews with international artists. I did not have any fears that any of the passengers would fold me. An interesting aspect of your performative practice is the fact that you are concerned in making the viewers aware of your process: we find this decision particularly interesting since it seems to reveal that you do not want to limit yourself to trigger the audience perceptual parameters, but that you aim to address the viewers to evolve from a condition of mere spectatoship. Are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, How open would you like your works to be understood? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Art Meets the Publicâ&#x20AC;?. In 2002 under this slogan, I created the Art Tour project in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain around Boxhagener Square. It was about how to interest neighborhood residents in the art.During the same time I saw artist David Hamond's statement: "The artistic audience is the worst in the world. Conceited, conservative, always dissatisfied. Nothing understanding but always inclined to criticism. It's never happy and never have a fun. I just wasting my time with such an audience. It's like jumping into the mouth of a lion. I do my art for street people. They are more forgiving and their reactions

come from the heart. They are not about pretending, because they have nothing to lose or to win ... " at the world exhibition Documenta XI in Kassel This sentence has also become the leitmotif of my actions. But on the other hand, waiting for the recipient to suddenly become interested in the art offered to him, is speculative. Artists and curators believe that art is closer to life through the conscious abandonment of the gallery. In the case of the "Kommunikations Kuss" performance, discussions about art with tram passengers was a successful function. We would like to introduce our readers to , an interesting art that inquiries into the taboos of female sexual organs. Would you share with our readers some of the experiences that you had in this occasion? Alexandra Fly Project is a continuation of the idea of action in public space directed at the average recipient, who is not prepared for the reception of art. The performance is based on a costume made of a dress covered with soft elements reminiscent of sex organs. The action concerns taboos and public provocation. It is presented most often in the context of large art exhibitions. I appear in this costume in public transportation a tram, a plane, or on the street. Some people photograph me. Many others consider this project very funny. For me, art is also about fun

Women Cinemakers

and wit. With this project, want to stimulate viewers to think about the role of women in society. I am referring to the rejection of the taboo associated with the vagina. It is about the celebration of genital organs, about the liberation of a woman from the patriarchal yoke imposed by religions and civilizations. I started the Alexander Fly project in 2007 and presented it annually at trade fairs in Paris, London, Basel, Zurich, Berlin, Brussels, and more recently in the USA in Miami Beach. This global project has been noticed. I performed at performative festivals in Miami, Prague, Rotterdam, Venice and Zurich. During performances, viewers are invited to a joint, improvised dance in my costumes imitating individual intimate parts of the human body. Dance is a denial of perfection. I put emphasis on sculptures and costumes, after all I am a designer. Movement is completely secondary to me. 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": as an artist particularly interested in what connects and what separates individual nations, do you think that your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? In countries controlled by political or religious dictatorship, spontaneous artistic activities in open spaces are punishable. People do not engage in discussions with

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Women Cinemakers strangers. In Germany, however, you can speak in public and you have the right to shape your appearance. Nobody criticizes you for tattoos, hairstyle or a mini skirt. There is no mandatory uniformity. Nobody imposes religion on you, or tells you what to believe and how to act. Tolerance dominates. Alexandra Fly is realised in democratic countries, where taboo breaking is allowed. The concept of art also depends on the political system. For example, in former Eastern European countries the emphasis was not on ideas, but on the perfection of painting, graphics, etc. Nations are approaching each other just as the culture of art and science should come closer. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, you are inspired by the ballad of John Lennon , going beyond age, culture, religions, human races and everything else that keeps people apart: how do you consider the role of artist in our unstable, everchanging contemporary age? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some Women around the world have been fighting for their rights for years because they have always been overlooked. Just as "All Men Shall be Brothers" from "Ode to Joy" written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 is best known for its musical setting by Ludwig von Beethoven in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony completed in 1824. Luise F. Puschs breaks with tradition, further modifying the piece to become "All People Become Sisters". This matches my

Women Cinemakers artistic initiatives. In the song Imagine, John Lennon introduced the utopias of the world. This song is a work of art for me. The hymn of people fighting for new visions. Reading the biographies of Yoko Ono, I learned that during a concert in Florida in the 1980s, the Republicans would not let Lennon sing this song. For me, the Imagine song is associated with the rights of minorities, with women's rights and animal rights. Personally, I would like people to not kill animals; to not brutally degrade cows to milk production, and that veganism would take over the whole world.I am fascinated by utopian visions of the world related to the right to self-determination, women's equality, protection of the environment. A portrayal of a world undivided by inequality, nationalism, or religion.The new hierarchy of the world undermines the traditional practices in art. I'm interested in universal topics. I investigate what connects and what separates individual nations, because all people, despite their differences, have something to do with each other. That's why I am inspired by the ballad of John Lennon "Imagine", going beyond age, culture, religions, human races and everything else that keeps people apart. Art has only sky, with no restrictions as to sex, age and origin. If, as a result of globalization, nations are approaching each other, is there a universal concept of art? Can art mean the same for all? We have appreciated the originality of your works and we have found particularly encouraging your unconventional approach. For more than half a century

Women Cinemakers women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Difficult question. We are now returning to conservative and right-wing movements in Europe and the world that want to restore women to the original role subordinate to men. Therefore, in many European countries, not to mention Arab countries, me and my projects can be combated. Recently on Facebook, a Polish friend called me a witch who will be burned at the stake. Over the years your artworks have been internationally showcased in several occasions, including your participation to the Gesamt project by Lars von Trier, presented at Kunshtalle Kopenhagen and to the international film festival in Gรถteborg and Locarno 2013. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to establish direct involvement with the viewers: do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of artistic language is used in a particular context?

without the applause of spectators. That's why the artist needs viewers' reactions. Of course, many galleries and artistic events complain about low attendance. We are wondering how to attract people to exhibitions and how to interest them in art. In open space for example the viewers are always present. Dialogue is necessary here. Some people think that art speaks for itself. It is true that the use of visual symbols can convey content and attract audiences. But conversations, explanations, verbal or written polemics are also important. Not every person is sensitive to visual art. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Alexandra. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I will strive to change the environment and social habits. I support the movement of vegans and environmental protection and the protection of animal rights, the right to self-determination and the right of women to self-rule. Projects are just waiting for lack of time. But first I invite you to my performance of Alexander Fly Dance on June 14 at 20.00 in GZ Art Basel in Basel, An der Messe Schรถnausstrasse 10, 4058, CH. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant

Society is always important. The artist does not exist

womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Roxana Barba Shot on a highway situated over a waterway, HERON is an improvised dance film about marginalization and rites of passages. With one foot on land and one on water, a woman and a heron are caught crossing spaces that are neither here, nor there. HERON is my first dance film. The story and movements unfolded out of an intimate encounter with a wounded heron. Although he remained beautifully defiant, utterly graceful and seemed to elevate out of his pain, he looked as impotent as I felt. I related instantly. The cinematographer followed me in a canoe under the I-95 Bridge, a highly trafficked highway. A dark underworld unfolded. Gesture by gesture, a story of a marginalized woman unfolded in the presence of a heron. Pulsing to the sounds of the cars passing on the highway, I found myself performing dense and controlled movements as signs of entrapment and a desire for flight. Rising and looking for light, she manages to triumphally jump over the bridge only to find herself in a new limbo, by the side of the highway.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Heron is a captivating short dance film by

choreographer, performer and multidisciplinary artist Roxana Barba: inquiring into the ubiquitous relationship between between human and nature, she initiates her

audience into highteneed experience. Featuring elegant cinematography and sapient composition, Heron speaks of marginalization and urban rites of passages, encouraging a cross-pollination of the spectatorship. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Roxana Barba's captivating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Roxana and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a

Women Cinemakers couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your undergraduate degree of visual arts from La Universidad Católica, you moved to the United States to nurture your education with a B.F.A in Dance from New World School of the Arts in Miami: how did these experiences inform your current practice? Moreover, how does the relationship between your cultural substratum dued to your Peruvian roots and your current life in Mexico fuels your creative process? I wish I had completed a BFA in Visual Arts but I was too eager to explore a dancing career and back then it was not possible to do both at the same time so I only managed to complete 2 years of visual arts studies. I have always been quite visual. Composition classes in college fascinated me and challenged my ‘visual paradigms’. When I’m making movement, especially on others, my visual thinking is always on. This may sound silly but there is this trick that I learned in art school. If you squint your eyes when you look at a composition somehow you balance what you see and notice if something is off. Well, I quint often but particularly when I am looking at everything as a whole. My choices are as visual as they are physical. However, sometimes I get stuck in this back and forth. I find that when the ‘story’ behind the work is solid, I have an easier time reconciling my choices. I spent 5 glorious and challenging years in Mexico

Women Cinemakers City but my home now is Miami. I’ve been living here for the last 15 years. In Mexico, I had the chance to work with three women choreographers and made amazing friendships with beautiful dancers. I remember having a strong reaction the first time I saw a performance in Mexico City. It was by a company called Barro Rojo. The work was full of life, raw and theatrical but I remember finding it over-dramatic. Looking back, I was having a sort of ‘dance culture shock’ coming from Miami, where the work was technically strong and polished but emotionally neutral. I felt very Peruvian when I was in Mexico but I also felt very much at home. In a way, Mexico made me feel my Latino roots deeper. I don’t believe I’m entirely conscious of how my cultural background influences my work. Perhaps my way of seeing things comes from those cultural ties. When I work off my most intimate connections, my experiences inform everything so one way or the other where I’m from and what made me inhabits my work. You are a versatile artist and your interdisciplinary practice allows you to combine dance, film and video to produce captivating works. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you tell us what does address you to such stimulating multidisciplinary approach?

Women Cinemakers I did not dance or made work for about 5-6 years. I was raising my son and 100% focused on providing for him as a single parent. I was not far away from dance though. I had an arts management job so I was actually surrounded by choreographers and visual artists. Little by little, I started accepting invitations to dance and I started feeling ‘it’ again. It wasn’t until I met my partner and collaborator Claudio that I went back to making work. He’s a filmmaker. He must have asked me 10 times to collaborate before I said yes. I was too scared, insecure and worried about what other people would say. The first day we went out to shoot I felt alive again. Alive in my dancing body! It was so exhilarating and came so easy that we must have done this about 10 times. No piece, no plan in mind, just play. We would drive until we would find ‘the spot’, We shot at open fields, construction sites, railroad tracks. canals, bridges, we shot canoeing and we also shot when we travelled. So, film and video came to me through collaboration. I have learnt a lot about filming and editing with him and now I see film differently. I discovered that there are many similarities between creating a sequence in editing and in choreography, so all these things end up connecting to each other and feeding my process. I’m still in a discovery phase, learning as I go. So far, we have done 1 dance video and 3 short films together and we are now working on a new performance/video installation piece.

we For this special edition of have selected , an extremely interesting dance

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 insightful inquiry into marginalization and rites of passages is the way your work provides the viewers with an intense visual experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develope the initial idea? One of the days we were ‘improv’ shooting, we went canoeing on a river under an I-95 (10-lane highway) overpass. This enthralling spot has water, iguanas and exotic birds sharing their habitat with never-ending traffic from one of the busiest highways we have in Miami. As we were filming, we saw a wounded heron trying to take flight. The story and movements unfolded from this encounter. Although he remained beautifully defiant, utterly graceful and seemed to elevate out of his pain, he looked as impotent as I felt. I related instantly and a sort of dark underworld unfolded. Gesture by gesture, a story of a marginalized woman developed in the presence of a heron. Pulsing to the sounds of the cars passing on the highway, dancing barefoot and in a camisole, I found myself performing dense and weighted movements as I crossed from under the bridge to the side of the river, to the side of the highway. The environment was harsh and the feeling of being ‘in the gutter’ was real. After shooting half a day, we put the footage to the side for a while but the experience stayed with me. I decided to go back and shoot a second day. We made an initial 3 minute cut and put it away once again. I wasn’t that happy with it. Finally when I went back into the editing room with Claudio and extended the cut

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into a 5 minute film, I felt I found the story I was looking for.

Featuring stunning landscape cinematography, has drawn heavily from the specifics of its enivironment and we have highly appreciated the way it perfectly combines with your elegant gestures. How did you selected the locations? Claudio used to have a studio by Miami’s Little River. This area is sort of a tropical paradise with exotic birds and manatees. Many years ago, the river used to connect with the Everglades, which is a 1.5-million-acre wetlands preserve on the southern tip of the US. Due to development, a large part of this river and other inhabitable swamplands were drained. The spot where we filmed illustrates this story so well. Miami is a car’s city built over water. I also particularly liked the light that filtered through the overpass bridge. We daresay that sound is equally important as images and we have highly appreciated the between and of the ambience. How did you structured the relationship between sound and gestures ? In particular, did you aim to suggest such an uncanny sensation in the viewer, with such persistent rhythmic commentary? It feels good to hear your positive feedback. Yes, I went for all of that. I really wanted to immerse viewers into what it’s like to be in the fringes and be sidelined. I experienced many unnerving sensations while I was improvising and I wanted to stick to those throughout

sound editing as well. I give a lot of credit to Claudio, whose pacing and rhythm in editing is on point. I selected an eerie piece called Sub Zero Conditions by DJ Chronos and layered it with traffic sounds. To emphasize the need of a bound between creative process and direct experience, British artist Chris Ofili once stated that " ". How would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a performance and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? What a great question. Personally, improvisation plays a huge role in my process. That’s ground zero for me and from there I build, feel, reflect, layer and start over. I don’t have a specific 1-2-3 when it comes to improvising though. Sometimes I just let my body move with no parameters and when I’m ready I introduce the concept. Other times, it may be an image I see that reminds me of the concept. For instance, right now I’m working with water and memories. I saw an image of an installation of fish nets that gave me an idea. There was also this gripping text from a playwright friend about a goldfish and when I put those 2 together, the scene was clear: A performer standing under a vertical fishnet in the shape of a lamp. We don’t see his head or torso, only his legs and there’s a hidden microphone hanging on the net. He’s saying things like ‘Who am I? What am I doing here? I am the Goldfish. I am that man that birthed you… I need

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a glass of waterâ&#x20AC;? Sometimes when these sudden ideas are so clear, effortless and spontaneous you just canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wait to try them out and when you do, either they crumble apart or work as well or better than the vision you had. On the other hand, when you are shooting and you have people and equipment, you are constantly working against time. If I choose to improvise then I only do it with specific parameters and people who feel comfortable improvising. We may shoot the same scene a few times and then I choose to do something different and let others play as well. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s always a level of uncertainty that can make you fearful but I find it helps me be more present, authentic and allows me to tap into my unconscious mind, which always interests me. We have highly appreciated the way Zenu accomplishes such insightful exploration of our place in nature and the surreal: how do you consider the relationship between perceptual reality and the realm of imagination? Moreover, how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? As producer, choreographer and assistant editor, I also contributed with creative input but Claudio is the one who wrote and directed Zenu. Zenu is an experimental short film with minimal dialogue and movement-based scenes. I have to admit that it took me some time to digest the surreal developments in Zenu. For some reason, in my dance work

Women Cinemakers and in films like Heron, movement is the agent that grounds everything for me. Bodily gestures are my language. Zenu can jump from a straightforward scene with dialogue to a moment full of disparate cinematic surrealism, like seeing a man walking into a TV through its screen. This language was new for me and I would find myself wondering precisely what you are asking. How much was it okay to leave to the viewer’s imagination. How much more straightforwardness they needed to follow the story and not feel at a loss. I was questioning my own beliefs. So, although I lean heavily towards pushing those triggers to stimulate personal interpretations, I am still discovering how to balance that out in film. Having said that, there is one scene in Zenu where I am floating on the water, I am the river and I am also lip syncing a 911 operator answering a call about illegal dumping on the river. I suggested that scene a bit after we were done shooting and it’s a perfect surreal-Zenu moment I am particularly proud of. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their artworks. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? The physical act changes everything. For me, the act of

materializing ideas through bodily action brings to life the original concept in unexpected ways. I personally have my own rituals that take me there and for me, reflection is key. I find that writing after rehearsal helps me crystallize images. These writings end up turning into sorts of road maps to the piece itself. Now, there’s a last iteration, which is the performance itself. There is this piece called #woman I performed two weekends back to back. The first time I performed at a gallery. The second time I did it in a warehouse as part of a festival that showed pieces back to back. In the second one, I had an audience watching while started setting-up props, sound and projections so the set-up itself became part of the performance. The performance seals the whole deal. and are the results of an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker Claudio Marcotulli and it's no doubt that collaborations are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: can you talk about your creative collaboration with Claudio and how it has evolved over the time?

Absolutely. We are partners and collaborators so living together and having time/space to share and feed each other ideas is a natural plus. Although we have distinct voices and our own aesthetics, there are these crossroads that we have paved over time. It’s interesting to think back and remember our first collaborations. Although we were already a couple, we didn’t know each other fully as artists so the first attempts were a bit superficial. I would

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improvise, he would shoot and then we would look at the

he’s directing, he’ll have the last word and vice-versa.

material together. At the very beginning, we did not see eye

What’s beautiful is to see that the breadth of your work is

to eye and struggled to get our way while we edited.

constantly expanded and when I go back to working on my own, I feel I carry that expansion with me. We help each

However, with time, we learned to trust each other’s

other grow.

choices. Collaboration requires generosity and trust. It’s also about honoring the work and respecting our roles. If

A still from

is your first dance film and it has been selected

Women Cinemakers Leadership Dance Conference in New York. It was a small room and there were other choreographers and filmmakers showing their work. I was so humbled and honored to be in that space and when I saw the film in the context of the curated program, I felt good about letting the powerful experience I had improvising lead its way to that room. It was a true pat in the back for believing in myself. Some dancers approached me telling me how much they enjoyed it and I enjoyed listening to different interpretations and answering questions. In Miami, the experience was a bit different because although I wasn’t there (the NY screening took place on the same day) I had family and some dance friends from the dance community. My playwright friend told me it was his favorite film and of course that felt amazing because I know he can’t lie! Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Roxana. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

for ScreenDance Miami Festival and Short Waves Festival, Poznan: how much importance has for your the feedback of the festival circuit? How did you feel about previewing it before an audience? I was extremely nervous. The first time we screened it was at NYU School of Dance as part of the Women in

In May, I will be doing Cucalorous’ Dancemaker Residency (North Carolina), where I plan on exploring ideas for a new dance film and possibly ideas for a feature film as well. I am also excited to be working with artist Jamilah Sabur on her new piece. I admire her work and it’s refreshing to be part of a fellow interdisciplinary artist’s piece. I have also been working with Claudio on his commissioned performance/installation piece that will

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be presented towards the end of this year. I stay busy

learned important things that will support my practice and

with work related to Zenu such as festival submissions

the films I make with Claudio.

and event screenings. I took my role of producer of Zenu

I want to keep nurturing myself as artist, mover and

very seriously and while I still have lots to learn, I have

filmmaker. I see myself diving into bigger projects, such as a

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feature, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m ready. I also feel I want to start honing on my

your team for supporting the work of women cinemakers.

filmmaking skills and focus more on the story and less on An interview by Francis L. Quettier

the technical aspects. I am very grateful for this opportunity and I thank you and

and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com