FRANCESCA FINI works
photo Carlo Maria Causati
FRANCESCA FINI live media artist, videoartist Trained as a digital artist, she has been working for 15 years as a filmmaker for TV and independent productions. She worked on numerous programs for RAI (Italian public television) and other channels. In 2000 she met the American artist, Kristin Jones and they collaborated on the “Tevereterno” (Eternal Tiber) project, creating monumental installations for the City of Rome. In 2008 she participated, with Kristin Jones, Kiki Smith and others, to the River to River Festival in New York, projecting her animation, “Moon Loop” onto the trees along the Hudson River. She presently participates as a video-artist and live media performer in numerous happenings in art galleries, museums and underground sites, and also takes part in festivals and international events such as the Videoholica (Bulgaria); Experimental Art Festival Biennale Baltica (Russia); LowLives (NY); Cologne Off & New Media Art Festival; Currents Santa Fe’; Moves - Movement on Screen (UK); 700is Videoart Festival (Iceland); Genoa Film Festival; Tribeca Underground; Arcipelago Film Festival; Portobello Film festival (UK); WRO New Media Art Biennale (Poland); Directors Lounge (Berlin); and Contravision Film Festival (Berlin). In 2010 she was one of the winners at the Magmart Videoart Festival (Video Under Volcano), with her CRY ME videoperformance. Also, two of her works won the on-line vote in the Celeste Prize section: “Live Media & Performance”. She also exhibited at the “Invisible Dog”Art gallery in Brooklyn.
During the same year she was selected by the Premio Termoli with her digital works; by the Art Shake Festival (exhibiting at Mondo Bizzarro gallery and Hybrida Contemporanea, in Rome, and immediately after at 91mQ Art Project Space in Berlin). She was invited by the Fondazione RomaEuropa to present her work at the Teatro Palladium in Rome, as part of the videoart exhibition, “Cantieri Temps d’Images”. In march 2011, she was at the Nappe dell’Arsenale in Venice as finalist in the Performance Art section of the Premio Arte Laguna. On April she was in Lisbon as a guest of the Anthropology Faculty of the local University, presenting her performance in an academic setting, as part of “No Performance’s Land?” festival. In May 2011 she was guest of the WRO Art Center in Poland, for the WRO 2011, the noted Biennale devoted to New Media. In June she presented, during four days, her new performances at MACRO Contemporary Art Museum in Rome, on invitation by the ADD Festival. She also has been invited by the “Omissis Contemporary Performance Art Festival”. Between October and November 2011 she has been in Bologna and New York, to perform her more recent pieces as a finalist of the Celeste Prize International. In January 2012 she was invited by curator Bruno Di Marino to participate with her latest video “Blood” in the show “Norme per la Rivoluzione”, with preview at the Volksbühne in Berlin and at the Cinema Massimo in Turin, in collaboration with the Goethe Institut. In March 2012 she won Magmart Video Art Festival with the video “Blood”. In september 2012 she was in Belo Horizonte, Brasil,
to perform at the prestigious FAD Festival de Arte Digital. In october 2012 she was at MACRO Contemporary Art Museum performing for Premio Adrenalina. In december 2012 she took part to the first Venice International Performance Art Week, in Palazzo Bembo. The exhibition included works by Yoko Ono, Jan Fabre, Valie Export ed Hermann Nitsch among the others. In 2013 she won the firts “Fonlad Performance Art Residency” to prepare a new performance in Coimbra, with the support of Istituto Italiano di Cultura.
photo foto Carlo Maria Causati
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES WHITE NOISE - video (2013) written and directed by Francesca Fini We see a woman immersed in a neutral white. The woman sits in front of a television that transmits statics. But then we see something sticking out from the screen, a red woolen thread. The woman grabs the thread and pulls it; at that point the TV starts transmitting a series of images of the ‘60s in America: propaganda films and old commercials, the journey of a man in space and a nuclear testing site. It ‘s like the red thread that she is now beginning to knit is the thread of time, as if in its unraveling it is unraveled the history of that period, in a web of contradictory images The video was produced on invitation by Magmart Videoart Festival for the videoart project 100X100=900, 100 international videoartists to tell a century.
link to video: https://vimeo.com/59710498
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES LISZT - video (2012) written and directed by Francesca Fini It is the beginning of the 20th century and three children are posing for a family photo. The children are young pioneers in a colony of Christian immigrants in Jerusalem. The subsequent intervention of the photographer has added to their bewildered faces the false colors of the photos of the period; a combination of chromatic shades with the odor of cookies and hot milk, porcelain dolls, long sea journeys, dusty old books, and an artificial “innocence�. This is the point of departure for a digital transformation in which the lower part of my face replaces that of the children, in a reversal of time and meaning crystalized in a non-time and non-meaning. Simultan Festival, Romania Cyberfest, Russia Reviewed on Anti-Utopias Art magazine
link to video: https://vimeo.com/46791124
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES VIRUS - video (2012) written and directed by Francesca Fini A video on the obsessive manipulation of self-image, which becomes a metaphor for the general confusion between real and virtual of the “Société du spectacle” prefigured by Guy Debord. The digital culture and its tools become a self-destructive virus. I could work on the face of Osama Bin Laden, but the fake photo-montage spread by the media as proof of his death is already an unattainable work of art . I then brought the concept within myself, in the heart of my “feminine” self-destructiveness, where the pen of the tablet becomes an “augmented” surgical scalpel deep into the void. FILE Festival, Brasil Cologne Off, Germany Headphone Festival, Sweden
link to video: https://vimeo.com/34762733
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES WOMBS - video (2012) written and directed by Francesca Fini How do you see yourself in the mirror? We do not ever see how others see us, we do not see how we really are. Wombs is some sort of dream about femininity. A woman meets her golem, a piece of clay without features, to be fashioned at will. The golem is a double of the woman, but an amorphous double, a newborn entity still sealed in its purity and fierce innocence. A deity (maybe an evil one) who is daughter and mother at the same time, in whose womb the woman hides to find peace. Reviewed on Anti-Utopias Art magazine
link to video: https://vimeo.com/44171531
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES HUMANS - performance (2012) written and directed by Francesca Fini Humans is a video performance that reflects over the power of Image on the human psyche. Its power is represented by manipulating the body itself, which becomes the screen of an inner distorted life. During the live video performance I intervene by drawing on the scene and over the bodies with my tablet. I draw with digital color but also with sound, because the movement of my hand on the tablet is tracked and converted into sound by a synthesizer. The stylus becomes then the baton of a conductor who directs and modulates virtual instruments in perfect synesthesia with flecks of color running through the dancers’ bodies. Sound in the Art, group exhibition curated by Marco Testa, Sassetti Art gallery, Milan 10 ragazze per Freud, curated by Lori Adragna, Palladium Theatre, Rome “video of the week” on Inside Art magazine
link to video: https://vimeo.com/38460139
photo Claudia Pajewski
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES BLOOD - video (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini The video is a reflection over my creative process as an artist. When I think about it I feel like some sort of serial killer, struggling with my own ghosts in front and behind the symbolic space of video-making; a transparent screen that become some sort of prison, where I murder my-self over and over again. Magmart Videoart Festival, among the winners of the 2012 edition Oslo Screen Festival, Magmart Section curated by Enrico Tomaselli Streaming Festival Norme per la Rivoluzione, curated by Bruno Di Marino. Volksb端hne (Berlin) and Cinema Massimo of Turin Hidden & Forbidden Identities, Palazzo Albrizzi, Venice
link to video: https://vimeo.com/28516388
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES PARNASUS - video (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini Parnasus is a video that tells a dream. And like all dreams, it comes from a small image nested in the mind. The image is a marble statue white as snow. I’ve never been driven by the fantasy of Winckelmann that still subdues our imagination. A misunderstanding, that of Winckelmann, that becomes the metaphor for an even deeper and more dangerous mistake: the illusion that the past, crystallized into a kind of noble and abstract projection, it is always better than us, it is always perfect. So in my dream I return to the statues the color denied. The color erased by the passage of time as you cancel the losers of history and forget the evils of the world. Berlin International Directors Lounge Fonlad 2012, on invitation by the festival File - Electronic language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brasil Sardinia Film Festival 2012.
link to video: https://vimeo.com/33705372
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES BLIND - performance (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini The purpose of the performance is to transport the audience in an immersive dimension in which the performer becomes the mediator of an experience of color through interactive sound. I perform a live bodypaint in front of a webcam which is programmed to recognize different colors. The information produced is then processed by the computer and sent to a digital synthesizer that activates a special sound for each color. The scientific research on the deep relationship between sound and color is the starting point of a personal journey in which I discover the connections between the senses. Corpo Festival delle Arti Performative Celeste Prize 2011 (finalist in the live media and performance section), Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna ADD Festival, MACRO Museum, Rome LPM Live Performers Meeting 2011
link to video: https://vimeo.com/26297848
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES WESTERN MEAT MARKET performance (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini A performance pieces that discovers meat as the very essence, the physical and material essence of the others. I tell this short-circuit, the magic of touch and recognition of the presence of the others, and of something elusive but undeniable, through interaction design. I have a low-voltage electrode in the arm. The other pole is attached to the foil that covers the table. When I touch the flesh, this is a conductor and the circuit closes, sending a signal to a digital synthesizer that translates it into sound. Celeste Art Prize International (finalist in the Live Media section), Invisible Dog Art Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2011 OMISSIS Contemporary Performing Arts Festival, Gradisca d’Isonzo, Italy, 2011 ADD Festival, MACRO Museum, Rome WRO Biennale 2011, Wroclaw, Poland
link to video: https://vimeo.com/26165102
photo Silvia Profumi
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES SELF PORTRAIT -performance (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini A black cloth is in the middle of the performance space. On the canvas runs a video that contains a mosaic of images of women in the 60s public domain. The “ephemeral� culture that reveals the stereotype of women and its distortion in the period surrounding the so-called image-obsessed society. She is and advertising vehicle, a messenger of social campaigns, the object of male desire in the first soft-porns in black and white. A picture that could be monotonous, but in reality is mysterious and ineffable, while the video runs, sent back and forth by the fast fingers of Francesca Fini handling a corset full of electronic valves and knobs. An electronic dress/prison that is also an instrument that makes up a noisy soundscape where you lose the words of those women of the past, while a painter tries to keep their faces on the canvas with white chalk. ADD Festival, MACRO Museum, Rome LadyFest Rome, 2011
link to video: https://vimeo.com/25976441
photo Silvia Profumi
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES THE SHADOW -performance (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini In the performance the tools at the base of interaction design and digital entertainment are incorporated within a traditional aesthetic vision that gives them new and unifying meaning. Technically the performance was designed to use a webcam connected to a real-time software that tracks my movements by associating them with sounds and turning my body into a synthesizer. The concept behind the performance is the desire of melting togheter two very distant languages: Shakespeare and a video game. So, the onanism of playstation becomes public spectacle, while the aesthetics of ritual theater decomposes in the psychedelia of a videogame. Celeste Art Prize 2011 (finalist in the Live Media section), Invisible Dog Art Gallery, Brooklyn, NY No performance’s Land, Lisbon Arte Laguna Prize 2011 (finalist in the Performance Art section) Venice ADD Festival, MACRO Museum, Rome Art&Stay Art Residency, Turin
link to video: https://vimeo.com/18660061
photo Mauro Romano
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES OASI NEL DESERTO -video (2010) written and directed by Francesca Fini “Oasis in the desert” is a project of videoperformative raids around the city. The project, by Francesca Fini is inspired by the philosophy of urban writing, with the substantial difference that in this case the “scratch” that marks the territory is temporary, being videoperformative, although is experienced with the same excitement of an illegal raid. What remains is video documentation of what happened, often in the absolute solitude and gloomy silence that characterizes most desolate areas of our cities Videoart festival Camaguey, Cuba Arte Video Roma Festival 2011, special selection curated by Cologne Off Proyector Videoart Festival, Madrid No performance’s Land, Lisbon Berlin International Directors Lounge RomaEuropa Festival “Temps d’Images” Videoperformance Art Festival “Escrita na paisagem”, Portugal
link to video: https://vimeo.com/12255715
SELECTED VIDEOS AND PERFORMANCES CRY ME -performance (2011) written and directed by Francesca Fini Cry Me is a radiography of the soul. As a woman, I reveal myself through videoart, playing with a tv display that is like an uterus where my secret “avatar” lives and sings. The video was inspired somehow by the visceral and visionary paintings of Frida Kahlo. The artwork in the display was originally a video shot with a dv camera and then manipulated into photoshop frame-by-frame, as a digitally painted animation. Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Women’s Glance, PAN Palazzo delle Arti of Naples, curated by Enrico Tomaselli Now & After, MMOMA Moscow, Russia Moves10 (Movement On Screen), UK Magmart Videoart Festival (among the winners of 2010 edition), Naples
link to video: https://vimeo.com/7962185
PROJECTS
Circuiti (Circuits) is an art project for the year 2013. The project is a series of mixed-media works that assemble and integrate traditional painting, collage, digital manipulation of video stills printed on canvas or paper, performance art “relics” and digital discs (DVDs, miniCDs) used as design elements in the artwork but also containing original audio and video. A woolen thread ties and holds together all these elements, creating a sort of “connective” drawing which becomes the signature of the project. The project consists of these works: - Five actions with red gloves (painting, video, performance) - One Key (painting and performance) - Mapping the void (digital painting, video)
link to website of the project http://circuiti.tumblr.com/
Five actions with red gloves is a work of mixed media on a 1.5 mt X 1.5 mt wooden board. The board was first decorated with scratches on a painted surface, while the female image was digitally painted using a videostill as a reference. The image was then printed on canvas and “sewn� on the board with thumbtacks and a complicated weaving of red woolen thread. The red wool also becomes graphic decoration, recalling the idea of the game while covering the nakedness of the figure. On the panel are also fixed the red latex gloves that are the cornerstone of the videoperformance inspired by the painting. The videoperformance is contained in the disc attached to the belly of the female figure. The main concept of the work lies in this ongoing shift from analog to digital and back, like a needle going in and out while sewing a fabric. The work, accompanied by a live performance, was presented in march of 2013 at Opera Unica gallery in Rome, curated by Maria Arcidiacono.
photo Enrico Cocuccioni
One Key is the painting, on wood table (1,5 mt X 1,5 mt), produced during a very intense action painting performance. The board is decorated with the dress that Francesca Fini used and dirtied during the live action. The dress is fixed on the board with thumbtacks that are the hubs of an elaborate geometric circuit of wool threads. Embedded in the painting there is also a cd which contains digital photo stills of the action painting performance. The installation of the work includes an elegant black digital photoframe showing a loop sequence of the stills. The performance is a live media experiment in which the portuguese artist Antonio Azenha and Francesca Fini, respectively in Coimbra and in Rome, perform in front of a webcam streaming their actions live on the Internet. They also manage to project their reciprocal streams in their own spaces, creating an interaction, in both location, between the physical and the digital performance. Antonio interacts in Coimbra with the live projection by Francesca from Rome, while Francesca interacts with that of Antonio from Coimbra. The work, accompanied by the photo sequence of the live performance, also recorded on the cd assembled in the painting, was presented in march 2013 at Museo Emilio Greco of Sabaudia.
photo M.Montemurro
Mapping the void is a serie of mixed-media works that integrate digital manipulation of vintage photos, fine art print on wood, manual intervention, assemblages of performance objects and digital discs (DVDs, miniCDs) used as design elements in the artwork but also containing original audio and video. I thought about the way I build my inner narration, both in the video as well as in performance, and I saw a mental map where each image recalls and links to others in an infinite branching that embraces my love for the past and my projection into the future through technology. The works are then “codes� that contain a story divided into chapters and told through video clips, photos and digital audio. But it is a story that changes based on the look that unfolds it, because the contents are arranged in a branching devoid of any narrative order. As in all Francesca Fini’s performative work, the eyes and the heart chase the instinct to hunt sense in the maze of contingency where, as in steam-punk comics, past and present merge together connected by a red thread, the lifeline of intangible emotion. It will be up to the viewer to build his/her own story based on the emotional connections suggested by the circuit.
PROJECTS
With an helmet is a project consisting of video, performance and installations, conceived as a work-inprogress. The original idea comes from a reflection on the state in which Italy is. We are prey to a sort of hopeless and soporific resignation. Our dull look accompanies the degenerative process that poisons civil society. The project begins with a video made in October 2012. In the video I apply in my right arm therapeutic electrodes set at maximum power, leading to strong muscle contractions. The contractions make a tiny cocktail flag dance on my skin at the rate of the national anthem. What is left in a ill country is only the mechanical rhetoric and the spasmodic appeal to a respect devoid of any genuine feeling. MACRO Museum, Premio Adrenalina Save The Beauty, Mondrian Suite Rome, curated by Lori Adragna
link to website of the project http://withanhelmet.blogspot.it/
foto Reuven Halevi
photo Carlo Maria Causati
PROJECTS The Golden Age is a performance project that plays on the themes of metamorphosis, mutation, power, identity and relationship. It plays with these themes through the use of natural magnetism. Two performers are at the center of the stage. They are wearing magnetized suits and masks. All around them is a “carpet” of many different objects: cutlery, broken toys, refrigerator magnets, colored metal balls, nails and bolts, cans, magnetized plastic objects. It looks like the dump of a big city, one of those polluted cemeteries full of sad and intrusive wrecks of everyday life. By contrast, the magnetic suits worn by the performers are made of a glamorous golden cloth, and also the masks are painted gold. They stand for the rational mind, the shiny beauty of civilization and human power. The performance is an epic struggle between Reason and Chaos, between the “golden people” and the rubbish, between the illusion of Eternity and the slow process of corrosion of History, devouring every human enterprise. The project, winner of the first “Fonlad Performance Art Residency”, will be developed during a residency in Coimbra, in april 2013.
PROJECTS Alone in the dark is a guerrilla art project. On the videochat Chat-roulette, communication between users occurs one on one and is absolutely casual. You never choose whom you will video-chat with; it is the system that casually fishes out your chat partner from the heap, when you connect in perfect anonymity. No one asks your first and last name; you do not have to register; and you do not need any nickname. You enter the chat and immediately there appears on your screen the face of a perfect stranger. The public of Chat-roulette is an animal of our times, frenetic and voracious, involved in a furious zapping involving the pursuit of meaning, love, contact, empathy and sex.
The first performer comes on stage. A fifteen-minute timer imposes an ideal time for the action, and offer a way out. The web-cam is connected to the network and there appears on the screen the first unknown guest. He does not know what is awaiting him. But he comes to you in his truth, ready to match his brain against yours, without filters, to pour out his soul, in some cases to share his desperate loneliness, the spark of a confession, the dizziness of masturbation. The challenge is to make him take part in the performance and keep him glued to the screen until the end.
The last edition of the project took place at Bracolo Art gallery in Rome,in may 2012. link to the website of the project http://aloneinthedark10.blogspot.it/
DIGITAL ART
THEY WROTE ABOUT FRANCESCA FINI national press SEGNOCINEMA RAPPORTO CONFIDENZIALE WIRED ITALIA IL MUCCHIO SELVAGGIO DIGICULT INSIDE ART ARTRIBUNE ART A PART OF CULT(URE) GLOB*ART*MAG IL CORRIERE DELLA SERA IL MESSAGGERO REPUBBLICA.IT IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO RIVISTA SEGNO MARIE CLAIRE INTER CITY MAGAZINE TV7 (RAI) international press THE VILLAGE VOICE (NY, USA) OCCUPY WITH ART (NY, USA) THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE (USA) TECNOARTE NEWS CORRIERE CANADESE THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES (RUSSIA)
LINKS website www.francescafini.com blog http://francescafini.tumblr.com/ complete video catalog http://vimeo.com/channels/francescafini ArtStack http://theartstack.com/f-fini Via dei Fabi 100, 00191 Roma tel: 340 9162400 mail@francescafini.com
REFLECTIONS In my videos the presence of the body in action is almost essential. In video performance there is a body that acts in space and time, in a sort of cinematic reworking of a piece of live art, or the image is crushed in formal abstraction and bright explosion of color. The body becomes pure energy, because those spots of bright color still arise from the electronic manipulation of the image of the body in action. The body acting in space and time is what guides me to essential knowledge and to the final kinesthetic representation of my inner world. My performances, especially those in which I use interaction design tools (webcams, sensors and electrodes), arise from an attempt to create a significant dialogue between the body in action and its virtual nemesis, which is a living material made of dynamic images and sounds. I would say that maybe this is the obvious characteristic of my work on the body, which is expressed in the boundary where the kinesthesia becomes synesthesia. The video and sounds are my alter ego. They look for an interaction with my body, in a real time exchange that takes place through the manipulation of sensors that turn the color into sound, the intensity of light into geometric shapes, the movement of the body into verbal flow.