WomenCinemakers, Special Edition, Vol.12

w o m e n WESLEY FAWCETT CRAIGH NATASHA LE SOURD TANIA CUCORENEAU AINSLEY THARP EVI STAMOU SASHA DIXON AMILIA GRAHAM ALICESON CARTER EMILIE DUVAL RUXANDRA MITACHE

INDEPENDENT

WOMEN’S CINEMA

Ainsley Tharp

cINEMAKERS W O M E N

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Contents 04 Ruxandra Mitache

120 Evi Stamou

SPRING MIRROR

There is no one online

32

140

Emilie Duval

Ainsley Tharp

Order From Chaos

Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography

54

166

Aliceson Carter

Tania Cucorenau

76

196

Amilia Graham

Natasha Le Sourd

London Bird

How Long?

Communion

Eve Running

100

206

Sasha Dixon

Wesley Fawcett Craigh

Finnbarr Projection

Prototype

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Ruxandra Mitache Lives and works in _________________________________

Working with painting, photography and video, my work tries to capture the plasticity of the medium.

Inspired by the interaction of light through different mediums, I explore the complex concept of perception and the abstract juxtaposition of the stable and unstable media.

My work is part of a meditative, transitive process in which the relationship with nature and light is of essence for my practice. In light and nature I find active inspiration, the forms generated provide immersion in transformative and regenerative processes An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Starting with an idea to shoot organic forms using macro photography, SPRING MIRROR is a stimulating experimental film

by Romanian visual artist Ruxandra Mitache, centred on the construction an abstract narrative from microcosms of nature in spring. Particularly interested into the relationship with nature and light,

Mitache reveals the ability to question the spectatorship's perceptual parameters, offering an emotionally charged visual experience, inviting the viewers to unveil the ubiquitous beauty hidden into the details of our everyday life experience: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Mitache's multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Ruxandra and welcome to

WomenCinemakers: we would like to invite our readers to visit http://ruxandramitache.com in we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you graduated in Fine Arts from Bucharest University of Arts: how did these experiences address your artistic research? Moreover, what does direct your practice to such stimulating multidisciplinary feature?

I am specialised in painting, painting for me is important.

I remember memorising poetry when I was little.

I remember me always drawing, painting with the right hand‌ the right hand because of the teacher, for me was naturally to interact with the left hand.

I like to work without the constraint of the medium, but sometimes, I find it quite interesting to juxtapose the traditional medium with the digital one, I think I try to capture the transitive relation between them.

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When I work with other mediums it`s always the vision of a painter, I try to explore the plasticity of the medium, to resemble the particular expression of transitivity, the poetic expression of the medium.

For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected SPRING MIRROR, an extremely interesting experimental video 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/208994575. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the organic level of direct experience, is the way your video escapes from traditional narrative form to pursue a sensorial richness rare in contemporary filmmaking: when walking our readers through the genesis of SPRING MIRROR , would you tell us what did attract you of this story?

Working with moving image for me it`s like freedom, I love to paint with time, with sound.

I love poetry, poetry is like a river always in motion.

generated provide immersion in transformative and regenerative processes.

My work is part of a meditative, transitive process in which the relation with nature and light is of essence for my practice. In light and nature I find active inspiration, the forms

SPRING MIRROR features gorgeous images that you captured through the technique of macro photography, balancing realism to expressionism: what

were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens?

SPRING MIRROR video art work is actually the first video art work I used macro lenses, an iPhone 6S camera and I used 7 / 14 mm

olio-clip macro lenses. I tried to capture the perfect light, to simulate the natural movement of the organic structures and to capture the fragile expression of nature.

It was a magic day, the timing was perfect, spontaneous.

We have highly appreciated the way SPRING MIRROR challenges the audience's perceptual parameters to explore the struggle between reality and the abstract dimension, your film provides the viewers them with a unique multilayered visual experience: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination within your process?

I am interested in the way the expression of the desire is enunciated, that`s why sometimes I love to write poetry. The specificity of the medium is an important chapter for me.

As you have remarked in your artist's statement, your practice is centred on the examination of the complex concept of perception and the abstract juxtaposition of the stable and unstable media. In this sense, SPRING MIRROR seems to reflect German photographer Andreas Gursky's words, when he stated that Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something: are you particularly interested in structuring your

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work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? `Only visual art is able to merge the two senses of reflection - intellectual and specular - as Van Alpen has noted.

The feeling of the beautiful, according to Kant, is grounded in the `free play`of the cognitive faculties intuition and understanding, which everyone shares - hence his definition of beauty as `what, without a concept, is liked universally`. (Stafford) And it`s important for me to appreciate nature, to play with the acoustics of the nature, to enjoy, to write abstract compositions.

Inspired by the interaction of light through different mediums, your experimental practice deviates from traditional videomaking to question the unbalanced relationship between everyday life's

experience and further levels of perception, reminding us of Sondra Perry's approach. Especially in relation to your editing decision, how do modern digital technologies affect your creative process?

Video has a meditative expression. I like the moving image medium because I can work with sound and because it takes time to become aware of what you`re actually seeing.

When I work with other mediums it`s always the vision of a painter.

Rather than aiming to describe a particular situation or story, your work question the nature of perception, with a particular focus on the relationship between stillness and movement. Austrian-British historian E. Gombrich, writing in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, talked about the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so that they can participate in the illusion: how did you

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I love the avant-garde movement and the experimental approach of editing video art, moving image.

When I edit I am always inspired by the musicality of light and I try to render emotions in sequential motions, experimental drawings, poetry, just sound.

Over the years you have participated to a number of exhibition from the international scene: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish direct involvement with the viewers, who urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So we would like to ask a question about the nature of the relationship with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception? And what do you hope your work will trigger in the spectatorship?

The composer does not need to take the public

into account. Whether the public enjoy their compositions should not be a matter of concern to them. The artist answers to no one but art itself.

Schoenberg once said that the only advantage of having an audience is that it improves the acoustics of the concert hall.

So the investigation is into the audience experience and into my own practice..

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

I think a lot of time and the way I present the work, the images I use, the compositions I construct in time.

I like to work without the constraint of the medium, and sometimes, I find quite interesting to juxtapose the traditional medium with the digital one.

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Right now I work for a new project I started in London. Actually is an extended version of an old project named Untitled Garden.

Untitled Garden ( Kew Garden ) will be a digital / analog project. Fist step for this project was to capture digitally the organically natural paintings from the glass windows at the Kew ( exotic house ). I will render also a moving image sequence after I will start painting with black ink on several frames of glass.

And I will transfer this drawings/paintings on the analog silver paper.

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

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Emilie Duval Lives and works in Houston, Texas, USA

My work is defined by research and observation to acknowledge how the economical norm is taking over the state norm and put societal equilibrium at stake. Since I studied law and art at the university, I have always been fascinated by the power of regulatory systems. I focus my interest on a wide range of geopolitical, economical and financial matters and translate them into a metaphoric vision to extract the very sense of the structural balance of our societies. My goal is to lead people to a new observation of their surroundings by triggering a questioning reflection.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Hello Emilie and welcome to

: you

are an eclectic artist and your practice connects several disciplines, including multi-layered painting, photography, mixed media, video and installation.

Before starting to elaborate about your current body

of works, 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 and an art discipline in order to explore a particular theme?

In order to develop a subject matter, I believe it is crucial to work on a wide range of supports without any barriers. I always start my creative process by producing

a large painting which defines the architecture of my topic.

Then I digress my subject matter into various media. The video is often created at the last stage of my projects to give a metaphoric glimpse of reality. I want that the viewer immerses himself into an alternative world of his structural landscape.

For this special edition of we have selected , a stimulating video 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 apparently conflictual relationship between structural Order and Chaos with the naturalistic one is the way your unconventional narrative provides the viewers with with such a multilayered visual experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of Order From Chaos, would you tell what does fascinate you of this theme?

Since I studied Law and History of Art, I have always been fascinated by the organization of complex societies and how visual arts and videos were a vector to describe our structural environment. The video Order From Chaos screens the observation of a landscape along a manmade bayou. The notion of running water within the city is linked with the deep intricacy of organized societies and their computerized future.

The shots of slow motion of water depict the societal order of survival by managing the natural chaos. The reasoning ad absurdum appearing in the video places the Order and Chaos in a game ending by the compliance to the order. The inevitable logic of the process is reinforced with mathematical symbols to replace any notion of humanity and self

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“I hate Order Order loves me Reason loves order I hate reason Reason hates me Order loves reason I love order without reason” I=Me O=Order R=Reason I am focused towards the future of societies and how population will be driven. I digitally added decentralized networks drawings over the face of human characters to give a glance at how individuals progressively lose their self representation. The naturalistic delightful garden from a Christian Dior runway delimits the space of existence by competing with nature. Finally, the last screenshot shows a deserted electoral arena. Ironically, this symbolizes the emptiness of our institutional choice by showing the last sentence of the reasoning ad absurdum “I love Order without Reason”.

We daresay that could be considered an allegorical report of the sense of continuous shift that affects our ever changing and media driven age, and we have particularly appreciated the way it provides the viewers with a unique multilayered visual experience: how much importance do metaphors play in your artistic practice?

A metaphoric vision is the experimental way to deeply tell the truth about our environment without any boundaries. I always use metaphors in my artworks to deeply touch the subconscious layers of the viewers. In the video “Order From Chaos”, I want to trigger the essence of childhood by showing a beautiful garden. With the drawings over the characters face,

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Women Cinemakers I create a futuristic fantasy which relates to the teenage years. Then comes the adulthood with the allegory of running water within the city and the electoral room. The organizational feeling of controlling the environment gives a sense of comfort. Using metaphors allows the spectators to think further and see their surrounding in a new way.

We have deeply appreciated your unconventional inquiry into the complexity of societal structures in our contemporary age. 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 political system you’re living under". As an artist with a background in Law studies and particularly concerned into how the economical norm is taking over the state norm, what could be in your opinion the role of a filmmaker in our unstable contemporary age? In particular, does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment?

Filmmakers trigger emotional response with their creations by testifying about the past, the present and the future of their time. They are the ledger of cultural and societal moments. With my background and obsession for the economical structural matter, I do not refer to a particular period of time. I would consider that I refer to the historical circle of societal organization through the eye of the economical matter which is often ignored due to its anxiogenic character. My research is based on the past and the present to envision the future of societies. I want to open doors for the viewers to be able to manage their surrounding.

As you have remarked in your artist's statement, your goal is to lead people to a new observation of their surroundings by triggering a questioning reflection: how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's cultural parameters? What do you hope your spectatorship will take away from your work?

I want the viewers to be able to create their own structural fantasy, to manage it and to act on their direct surroundings. By being able to manage their inculcated layers of societal environment they will have the cultural knowledge to revise or accept what defines their persona. has drawn heavily from the specifics of its environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such powerful resonance between opposites by the combination of the images images extracted from a Christian Dior fashion show and urban and environmental elements.

How do you consider the relationship between environment and your creative process?

I was always fascinated by the deployment of nature within the city and how it takes back its dominance without warning when its pushed too far. Nature is a structural composition that humans have always wanted to compete with. When I look at my natural environment within the city of Houston, I found a destabilizing chaos which forges an order for a survival purpose. It also depicts how the economical factor takes place in societies by showing the ratio between human dominance or subordination over environment. This influences profoundly my creative process.

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provides the viewers with a glimpse of the future where computerized networks will define the natural order of existence: how will in your opinion the online techno sphere affect the consumption of art by the audience? In particular, do you think that new global communications will give birth to a new kind of sensibility?

In my opinion the techno sphere increases the digital consumption of art without boundaries. The inhibition towards art is replaced by the social productivity and the desire of being virtually trendy. If you refers to the chaos theory of algorithms, they determine a new sensibility and aestheticism disconnected from the reality.

As shown in my video “Order from Chaos�, the people faces are hidden behind drawings of decentralized networks and are staged in a Dior runway show. In these sequences, I depict the loss of individual self-being when the implemented algorithm command how people are supposed to behave and be integrated in the societal group. This ultra interconnection constitutes a dictated and efficient sensibility.

Over the years your works have been showcased in several occasions, including your recent solo at the Texas Arts and Music Festival: one of the hallmarks of your approach is the ability to allow the spectators to engage with the authenticity of the moment. So 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 medium is used in a particular context?

The component of space is the most important as my thematics often revolve around the societal organizations.

With my large scale paintings pairing with installations and videos, I impose a strong structural entity to my audience to trigger either an interest or a disengagement. My decision making process is almost only influenced by my vision and the quest to demonstrate my societal vision which result by naturally selected audience. I would say that my audience influences me more intellectually speaking than in the visual creative process.

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?

Often in high political and economical spheres, women are invisible. Being a women and unconventional are both disadvantaging, which drives me even further. First by being completely free of any theory or rules. I can mix any topics, medium or presentation without restriction. Secondly, it gives me the time of reflexion which is fundamental in my artistic discipline. It allows me to go back and forth with the past and present to envision the future.

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

My upcoming project called “Now You Know� will be developed within the years of 2018/2019. It will narrate the story of injustices triggered by the lack of societal and structural empathy. I will create a series of paintings pairing with installations. Each painting will be presenting a case of structural injustice, reflecting over a community. For example, the story of the Abacus Federal Savings Bank indictment and the impact of the prejudice suffered by the New York Chinese community. The painting will be complemented with a video.

The video will screen a metaphoric vision of the unfair prosecution and the human suffering resulting from the political architecture of the absolute power of institutions.

How do you see your work evolving?

Over the coming years, I want to meticulously develop my vision of the structural power and the future of societies. To accomplish my quest of envisioning a future, I have to focus on all the layers which constitute the societal organization and navigate through the past and the present. My work will lean toward a more minimalist visual to extract the principal essence of my perception of the future.

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

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Aliceson Carter Lives and works in Shaftesbury, Dorset, United Kingdom

Aliceson started at Art Education in her late 30‘s studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London 2006-2009, since then she has continued to make work, exhibiting widely, both here and abroad, and taking part in several international residencies. Recently she won the People’s Choice Award at Black Swan Arts Open in Frome, for the multi- exposure photographic piece In England’s Green And Pleasant Land. Carter’s work starts from points of observation, of time and place and our interactions within them, she is interested in these small moments, and plays with them to create works that allow reflection of the world around us.

Work usually has a performative element to it and it manifests itself in the form of video, video installations and photography.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Hello Aliceson and welcome to : we would start this interview with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a BA of Fine Art in Studio Practice & Contemporary Critical Studies, that you received from the prestigious Goldsmiths College: how did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, does your direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer your questions. I hope to find out more about my practice through this interview, as outside the confines of education it is not often you get prompted to reflect.

My time at Goldsmiths completely formed my contemporary critical practice, so in that way the course title was spot on. I started the course when I was 38, after a Foundation Course at Croydon College. I had recently got divorced and had three children ages 10 to 15, so it was a pivotal – and very busy – time for me. Previously I had done art evening courses when the children were small, and my first job at 16 was as a trainee draughtswoman in the days of pen and ink.

Later on I painted murals and trompe-l'œil for schools, homes, and with young offenders. School art wasn't a great

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Women Cinemakers thrill for me, it was a time of painting still lives - there was no contemporary art education at all. I remember a fuss on the news when Carl Andre exhibited his bricks in the Tate Gallery, that was about it until my art foundation. Although I had been painting and drawing for years, I had no idea how to start expressing myself artistically before college, so it was an exciting time. I had found a place that was all about encouraging you to question and explore how you feel and look at the world. The facilities were great and I made the most of them. It was a time to experiment and play, it was hard though. It did push me constantly over the 3years, and of course I had the children too, so I felt like i was wearing different hats constantly. I definitely evolved there.

I believe that my cultural background of suburban mum has a direct influence on my work. I notice small humdrum moments that catch my eye, and I don't have big dramatic reactions to most things. I am quite measured in my approach whilst having big flurries of silliness, and that comes out in my art. Most of my work stems from me going about my business. I don't go out and look for it, it comes to me.

You are a versatile artist and your pratice is marked out with feature, that allows you to such stimulating range from video, video installations and photography: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does approach? address you to such captivating How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme?

I am drawn to lens based media as it frames the subject. You are narrowing down the field of view from the outset, it forces you to form a composition within the view finder. This excites me visually, and i think it is similar to when I was draughting, the

blank piece of vellum with its boundaries and layout considerations. I suppose deciding between using video and photography is based on intuition and a gut feeling.

Recently I have been using multiple exposures with an analogue 35mm camera to form images, almost of a filmstrip nature, documenting my movement around different locations. Using a stills film camera you can play, to limited amount, with the process as the image is being made. All effects happen in camera for me - I only use Photoshop for layout - so you have limited control over what is produced. I love the luck element of the process, the delay in getting a roll of film back from the developers is cause for excitement.

Whereas video lends itself to play and experimentation after the event. I find, even though I don't look forward to the technical elements of editing, moving pieces of footage around to form a fluid line is fun. There is a certain joy when you find the sweet spot, its like hitting a tennis ball with the centre of the racket, it all comes together somehow at the right time.

I have also been rediscovering my love for etching, I am working on a series of studies of fruit printed onto brown paper bags. I first fell for printing at Goldsmiths. The print room was a quiet refuge - the etching process is quite long and enjoyable, there is something about this removing the finished image from direct representation that calls to me. It's probably me distancing myself from my artwork before university, layers of process or imagery interest me more now and I feel the need to push my work in different directions.

For this special edition of we have selected , an interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. Drawing inspiration from the presence of rare species of bird in the city of London, your film draws the viewers to a multilayered visual experience, addressing them to the notions of natural history films: while walking our readers through of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

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As I said previously sometimes ideas come to me. I was on a day out in London visiting galleries and had taken various still digital images of buildings. On my way to the tube I happened across a shopping trolley filled with all sorts of cleaning things, including a large ostrich feather duster which was blowing in the wind. I initially walked past it and then did a double take when I saw it as a living thing, a piece of London wildlife. I only took about 5minutes of video on my digital stills camera and knew that it was something that I could use later. It was one of those moments where something happens out of the corner of your eye, you don't have to look for it directly. Its like seeing animal shapes in clouds, or faces in street furniture.

The narrative was based on the form of a mock animal documentary, playing with notions of natural history films and referencing various wildlife that makes it up the River Thames every now and then, only to perish after making it onto the T.V. News. London Bird does find itself stuck in the Thames mud and doesn't make it out, and for some magical reason we have formed an attachment to it as if it were a real animal. We have a moment of sadness before remembering that it is a shopping trolley and a duster, and then we are left smiling. I was interested in this type of narrative as I had noticed recently that there seems to be a change in the way natural history programmes have changed tack. They present the animals almost as a fly on the wall documentary would, or an animal soap opera where we get to know them as characters, they play, forage, reproduce and then are shown facing some sort of grave danger. It pulls us in and becomes emotive. I think the fascinating thing about watching film, video and T.V., we submerge ourselves in it, there can be all sorts going outside of the screen but it's as if our eyes edit out the surrounding objects and make it a 'fullscreen' view for the time we are engaged. It is a tool to escape the reality around us. The knack is to get the viewer engaged.

has drawn heavily from and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such powerful with the idea of outside world: how did you select the locations and how did they influence your shooting process?

I was interested in the London skyline and the relationship the buildings have with each other, as I find the mix of architecture in a city is in a constant conversation with itself around history and aesthetics. The city skyline is generally missed as you have to navigate your way around without collision, but I always try and pay attention to what is above and around me. The upper edges of where the buildings meet the open space is always visually interesting. Cities are always jostling for room, there is so much going on below and then suddenly it is free, refreshing, blue sky.

It was this juxtaposition that I was trying to capture.

I made a video for my degree show that put pigeons walking around the top of a chimney, besides footage from people circling the bottom of Nelson's Column, they mirrored each other almost identically. I suppose it's this noticing of behaviour that resonates with the London Bird. There is something human in its make up, it was a readymade in essence, made up of human behaviour. It was filled with various collected objects and parked in a safe place to be relocated later on. In central London a shopping trolley is not something that you see very often, as big supermarkets are located further afield, however they are used by the homeless to ferry their possessions around. They are set free from the luxuries of food and commerce, instead they are full of life's true essentials and belongings, this repurposing is a city phenomena that carries some weight for me.

Saying all that though I didn't see it all at the time, it is only later when you have time to reflect and question your actions and thinking that it becomes apparent.

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Women Cinemakers As you have remarked in your director's statement,

: what was your editing process in order to achieve such a balanced structure? In particular, do you prefer to meticolously schedule every details of your editing process or do you go with the flow?

I am definitely a go with the flow person, in all that I do really, and especially in editing. It was not until I imported the files to the timeline that I really knew where it was going to go, that is where the fun started, in the editing.

The video footage was laid onto the various still images of London I had taken that day, allowing the bird to move around its habitat. I was going to attempt to cut out the trolley from its background but I rejoice in the freedom of not being very technical in most things I do, and this adds to my personal artistic aesthetic. Having the minimised hand held video footage of the trolley on a static background adds to a sense of oddness, and I find that oddness catches the eye, especially when you notice a gull frozen in mid flight. Obviously buildings do not move, so I could have used footage from a video camera sat on a tripod, but by using the still photographs of London it does appear differently on the screen.

All of the audio was utilised too - the warning signal from a reversing truck turned into the London Bird's mating call and a passing persons laugh was chopped up and re-stiched to form the sound of the bird in flight. There was no layout plan at all, the narrative was formed by researching facts on ostriches whilst mixing it with my own experience of shopping trolleys, I really had fun making it all up.

German art critic and historian Michael Fried once stated that ' .' What were the properties

Women Cinemakers that you were searching for in the materials that you include your artworks?

First of all I completely disagree with Fried's statement.

Materials are evocative, memories of touch and smell, of weight and reason. We are attached to materials daily, they are of great importance to us and therefore make a difference to the artworks we produce. Whether I use digital or analogue film has a consequence in how the piece is read by the viewer. If I use a traditional etching piece of paper it instills a different meaning and thought process than if I choose to use a paper bag from the grocers. In recent life drawing classes I have been using plastic sheets, tissue paper and cardboard, they change the way you draw, the mark making is completely different with each surface. Your hand reacts to the medium and it in turn gives the eye a different form.

Materials have the ability to turn things on their head to add a sense of oddness and experimentation, they add a weight to the work. I suppose I do look to the ordinary but not obvious materials in my work, maybe ones that have been overlooked or passed by; the same way I look to the quiet, everyday moments to capture. Just because etching is an old art technique does not mean that it can't be talking in a contemporary language.

I think Fried was after a reaction from his words, he voiced them at a time where the avant-garde was being surpassed by minimalism. Perhaps he was panicked by the foregoing of the emotive and vibrant actions of the past being replaced by the pared down and conceptually concentrated world of the new where everything was allowed to be read and quantified?

Another interesting work that we are pleased to introduce to our readers is entitled and it was filmed on the south coast of Devon with a camera phone: what did fascinate you of the actions of coastal

erosion? In particular, do you think that the apparently between water and rocks could be considered a metaphor of the elusive still ubiquitous synergy between opposites?

We were lucky enough to spend a week staying near a small cove in Devon, the beach was surrounded by steep cliffs made up of different forms and colours of rock, you could clearly see the movement and how the geology had shifted through time.

The idea for the film came from an overbearing urge to touch the sea water in the rock pools, and a similar compulsion to wet the rocks; to see them shine and take on a different appearance. I persuaded my daughter to provide the hands and we spent about 20minutes paying a visit to various locations in the cove with a bucket of sea water. My direction to her was to caress the rocks, I saw her actions as an attempt to soothe and connect emotionally to them. They go through a twice daily battering and low tide seemed like a good time to show them some respect and reverence. I see the film as an homage to the sea/rock relationship, they, like the city buildings are on the edge of something, standing tall whilst the waves churn, before meeting the calmness of the open water.

We have highly appreciated the way from the waves creates capable of walking the viewers to the interstitial point where reality and imagination find consistent points of convergence: are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate ? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood?

Hearing the sound of the waves continually crashing onto the sand and shoreline throughout the week began to feel as if it

Women Cinemakers were a heartbeat, the rhythm was omnipresent. I deconstructed the audio and timed the wave sound to coincide with the hand action so that the rhythm is broken slightly, I think this rhythm helps lull the viewer as if listening to a lullaby. It soothes you. The phone camera was hand held so that there is also a slight rhythm to the camera movement, it sways slowly and lightly, reinforcing a rocking motion of the waves. The screen is split too as I held the phone in a portrait position, there is an overlap in the field of vision so that the hand enters the two screens at slightly different times. This offset double screen seems to work by drawing the eye from one to the other, an effect I came about whilst playing around in the editing process.

Water has long been know to be restorative to the soul and we are drawn to it, finding peace and tranquility when near. I am interested in letting the viewer drift to their own place whilst watching. I do use quite a lot of long takes and real time in my film making, it creates a space for something else to occur. I would like my work to be partly understood, the missing part would be a conversation between the viewer and their own experience of the world. It is not for me to prescriptive, I put out a suggestion of how I see things, people will connect to their own version.

As you have remarked in your artist's statement, you are interested in small moments to create works that allow reflection of the world around us: in this sense we daresay could be considered an allegory that of daily life: how does your fuel your creative process?

Kodachrome The End was borne out of strong and desperate urge to commemorate the passing of an iconic film stock.

Kodak had stopped making Kodachrome film and then stopped making the chemicals to process it. I had already

started a project whereby I sent film camera users around the world a roll of Kodachrome and asked them to take a couple of photographs of the address on the pre paid processing packet that came with the film. Some of the now disused labs were demolished, empty buildings or ones that had been taken over by other companies. I had the resulting photographs printed on Cibachrome, which by coincidence had also been discontinued, I found the last lab in the U.K. using it and got in there before they closed.

The last lab left processing Kodachrome was Dwayne's Photo Lab in Parsons, Kansas, and I felt I had to go there. I took my last rolls and documented my journey and the last day of the lab receiving film. My last shot on my last roll was of the office clock at midday, the cut off point for deliveries. I had to sit down outside for a while after the film rewound, I think I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment.

My film was in the last batch processed and by chance I was interviewed for the article by A.G.Sulzberger which appeared on the front page of the New York Times.

Back home I filmed the projection of the slides and added the narrative text in the edit. The film is reminiscent of childhood, evenings spent gathered round watching family holiday snaps appear on the large screen. The clack of the projector creates a rhythm that again lulls the viewer into a relaxed and open state. The story of Kodachrome and its passing does resonate with a lot of people. The brightly coloured slides are so small, yet magically contain so many treasured memories. The colour palette automatically speaks of the past. Kodachrome was something that was used by thousands of people the world over, capturing everything from key family moments to Steve , as well as being sung about by McCurry's famous Paul Simon. In some ways it was the feel good film.

Women Cinemakers If anything Kodachrome The End is an allegory of progress, not everybody sees the advancement of technology as a good thing. We connect to things that are hard to let go of, we like routine and rhythm, it grounds us, makes us feel safe. I feel a loss for the bright and shiny Kodachrome days, we can't capture the memories in the same light anymore. The filters on Instagram are no replacement.

Over the years you have internationally exhibited and has been selected for screened your work and the Festival in Albuquerque: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish with the viewers, who urged to from a condition of mere spectatorship. So we would like to ask you a question about the nature . Do you consider ? And what do you hope to in the spectatorship?

I do consider the audience when film making, I want the viewer to enjoy the process of watching my films. I am lucky enough to have my films shown in galleries as well as at film festivals. I think it is harder to engage the viewer in an art gallery context, our time is usually limited by outside factors and you do get into the habit in a gallery of moving along to the next work rather than sitting for a while and really looking. You have to give something as a viewer in a gallery, to decide you are going to sit and give it your time. There is an argument that video art shouldn't be enjoyable, that enjoyment is reserved for T.V. and Cinema and I partly agree with it.

Films that have made it to festival screenings are received differently, there is an expectation of being entertained whereas art gallery viewing is expected to be slightly boring. Boring is an OK term and I do use it to good effect. Boring sets up a tension in the work, of not knowing when 'something' is going to

happen, it allows the viewer to drift away and to be brought back.

I suppose I am interested in the moments when the viewer decides to watch and then gets lost in it enough to make it to the end. When I have watched a film of mine with the audience present I am thrilled when anyone watches for the duration and overjoyed if it gets a little chuckle or a smile off realisation or acknowledgement.

Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ' ', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional in this artist? And what's your view on interdisciplinary field?

I think that I was lucky in a way that I was brought up at a time when Thatcher was Prime Minister, not that I agree at all with what she did or said by any means, just that she was a woman.

A woman can be a prime Minister, one of the most important jobs in the country. My mum also worked in a skilled job so that I didn't really feel growing up that being a girl was going to hold me back. My daughter is at a London Music College studying classical Tuba, she started when she was 8. Her dissertation was titled Where Are All The Women? an exploration into the perception of brass instruments as masculine. There are lots of fields where equality needs to be challenged, not forgetting that men are also discouraged from some careers that are seen as feminine.

Whilst at Goldsmiths the cohort was predominately female, I think that is quite a common phenomenon. Compare this to an article in 2016 Wired magazine, where it reports that female

Women Cinemakers artists would make up 36% of the work on display at the Tate Modern after the Switch House extension was opened. You have to ask why that is not 50%.

I don't see my work as being gendered, my work doesn't talk of politics even though I do. It talks of being in this world noticing the small things (that are really the big things). This makes it accessible to the viewer, you don't need and Art History Degree to engage with my art.

I think that by women artists making work and persevering in getting it out there we will succeed. There is a change in attitude happening gradually, our work is as valid as a man's, they are as equally important, at the moment there is imbalance of power at the top level. The use of that power and strength has taken a hit this past year and perhaps different attributes will win through in the end.

We can all be put into segregational boxes labeled with sex, race and class etc, but it is being seen as an individual that I think is the most important. However, until equality is achieved I think there is a place for women's film festivals and creative magazines that highlight and encourage our work Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Aliceson. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

A couple of months ago I would have answered the evolving part of the question very differently. In April I had an exhibition with another artist, it was in essence a multimedia landscape show. I exhibited a video installation piece that I had made when at Goldsmiths and it fitted perfectly with the other recent works. It was clear aesthetically and conceptually that I have not really moved on, I found this quite grounding. Sometimes when you use a multidisciplinary approach and use various media it feels that you are spreading out too far, that the work

is not a coherent mass. But it does now feel like I have a body of work even though I do push at the edges.

I did have a lull in art making for a couple of years due to being quite ill, I was in hospital with Pneumonia for nearly a month, which took a long time to get over. Then I was diagnosed with Postural Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), which luckily, I have now learnt to manage with diet and water/salt intake. We also moved from South London to North Dorset during this time. I have found living in the countryside to be restorative and feel rejuvenated by this whole experience now things have settled down and I am feeling better. Actually it feels like another pivotal time for me, though this time around it is less rushed and pressured.

A quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, a favourite poet of mine, came up on my news feed yesterday and it sums up what I hope to fulfil “As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love�, it's a good one for an inspirational reminder.

As for future projects, I have just sent a roll of Agfa Scala (a black and white slide film) off to be processed in Germany, so I am excited to see what is on the roll when it returns. I shot some portraits of people from the village I live in and I am planning to hand colour them in some way with their favourite colour. It's a question that is seldom asked as an adult and most people when asked do have one, I am interested to see where it goes. I also have been working on a series of photographs of blocked up windows taken with Kodachrome film. The film, as I have said before, cannot be processed in colour processing chemicals anymore, but it can be processed as black and white. The blocked windows stand as a symbol for the obsolete and the bygone.

As for film making, I have an idea for a looped video installation of footage of floating sticks in rivers, watch this space!!

Women Cinemakers meets

Amilia Graham Amilia Graham is a London-based artist born in 1998. She has recently completed a foundation course in Fine Art at Central St Martins, during which time she has shown films at LUX and the Lethaby Gallery.

Amilia’s work looks at the external world in terms of how it relates to the individual human body. Every artwork she makes begins with a decision to look outwards, pushing against her own body with a tentative curiosity for what lies beyond. From this angle, the body never fully enters the frame, but is the origin of the work and its context, and the lens through which it should be viewed. The artist recognises that the external world as alive and active in the same way that she is. For this reason, she often finds herself using living organisms in her work as a way of staging encounters between herself and the external world where the world is presented as a sentient other, rather than just a passive object or resource. It is in this space that she explores the tension between body and world, internal and external, the self and other.

Amilia’s work is unsettled and cannot be entirely fixed or described. Whilst her motivation for making art is a desire for unity and clarity, the unattainability of this is evident from her work, which often has a feeling of ephemerality, of something that is always slipping away or disappearing from view. Visit

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

Hello Amilia and welcome to : to start this interview we would like to invite our readers to visit and we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You are pursuing a solid formal training and you have recently completed a foundation course in Fine Art at Central St Martins: how did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? Are there any particular experiences that did direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

Before I started at St. Martins I wasn’t living in London. I think that moving to London probably had a bigger impact on my work than the

course itself did. London happens so quickly; the way I worked during this time was informed by my experience of my body as feeling constant and fixed but everything around it changing all of the time. I tried to get to know the city by riding the bus around a lot and writing things down that I saw out of the window and revisiting them later. My artwork was a response to this place; a place that wouldn’t stay still and let me look at it long enough to make anything that seemed significant out of it. Before then I was used to having a lot of time and space to make meaning out of things, to really inhabit space in my own way. But now I was living in a landscape that was alive in the same way that I was. My work inevitably changed because of that. It went from being predominately sculptural to being more time-based; mainly film and poetry. It was less physical, instead manifesting in fluid ways in different areas of my life and not fixed to any particular medium or practice. It became more difficult to talk about with words. The

notion of ephemerality, whilst never something I aimed for, seemed to be closely tied to my work. In searching for an alliance with the physical environment I was in, for a sense of purpose and place, I was met with instability and shift. I did have a very moving experience with a piece of stone in an occult bookshop in Bloomsbury earlier in the year. A woman (who I later learnt was a witch) handed me the stone and asked me to tell her how it made me feel. It had this weight to it, a deep, knowing, sadness, and a clarity which gave it the sense of something you look into, rather than at. When I told her this she said that she’d picked it up whilst on a walk through the woods during an existential crisis after her husband had left her, and that it was still embedded with the energy that she imparted on it when she touched it. Of course she could have been lying, but I don’t think that really mattered to me, because it felt true. The experience pushed me towards a realisation that there are conscious energies in the world that these can be transferred through contact with physical things. I wanted my artwork to imbed the world with meaning in this way, and to have the same quality of transcendence and permanence that I felt in the stone. But I haven’t been able to achieve it yet. Maybe the fact that my work is more ephemeral and unstable is because I’m an artist and not a witch. I can’t actually change anything. I now see my work as little glimmers of meaning, like light shining through cracks in the walls, that disappear as quickly as the idea came into my head.

As for the foundation course itself, I don’t think it really changed the way I went about making work in terms of research or subject matter, but it did definitely impact how I view my practice. It was the first time I had ever experienced being in an environment full of other creative people. Initially I found this quite difficult at first to stop myself from associating too much with other people’s artwork and allowing it to filter into my own practice. It’s so easy when you’re in that environment, especially when you’re not really settled in your practice yet, to just make art about art. I had to learn really quickly that being an artist means distancing yourself from everything to some extent- even other artists. It was important to me that personal experience should be the starting point of my work; I had to remind myself of that when I first started. I think I was really lucky in that my background before St Martins was really liberal, at my school we were given complete freedom to make what we wanted, so in that time I had already developed a personal connection to my practice. If I didn’t have this I think I would have found going into an arts institution like Central St Martins really overwhelming. The best thing about foundation was when I learnt that being around other artists was useful in a different way, however, which is getting

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers feedback on your own work. At some point during the year, I began to realise that I was making art that I couldn’t fully explain because I didn’t entirely know what it meant. Getting feedback from peers is really crucial in this way, because it was other people’s interpretations which influenced my own interpretations. I learnt that an artwork isn’t just the physical manifestation of a concept, but is more unstable and subject to discussion and change. I hear what other people say about my work and a lot of the time they seem to understand it better than I do or have more interesting ideas about it than me.

For this special edition of we have selected , a captivating video Installation 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 captivating inquiry into is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with a stimulating multilayered quality: when walking your readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

I had to make a film for a showreel in an upcoming exhibition which would be no longer than 1 and a half minutes. This time frame was the only given criteria I had to go from, so in its most basic sense the film is an attempt to fill this time. I wanted to focus on this moment and stay in it, to really feel what it’s like to exist for 90 seconds in a body, in the world. I wanted to feel it in the fullest possible way. I wanted to find a way of transcending the limitations of the self and of time and really just be in that moment.

Obviously that’s impossible, and the impossibility of that is reflected in the film, but that’s what I was moving towards. The film starts by a hand, my own hand, reaching out and touching a glass, which sets the subsequent action of the film in motion. The initial gesture of physical touch prefigures a deeper encounter with the external world. It also reflects the creative act, of the film as a way of touching space. I can’t really remember how I had the ideas for particular elements in the film, only that I knew what I wanted to make before I knew what it meant. So there wasn’t really much development thereI think I made it within a week of having the idea for it. I wanted to get everything visualised whilst it was still fresh in my mind and before I began to intellectualise it. So everything I think about the film now is just speculation, thoughts that I have had prior to making it and discussing it with people. I feel quite detached from it now, like it doesn’t really belong to me.

To me it feels like autonomous thing that exists on its own terms, something which I think a lot about but never really decide on what it means.

Both realistic and marked out with dreamlike quality, is marked out with an essential and at the same time seductive beauty on a visual aspect: we dare way that it attempts to unveil the invisible that pervades our reality but that cannot be detected by our sensorial experience. Do you agree with this interpretation?

Moreover, how do you consider within your process?

When I was making this piece, I was saw it as an intensification of what I was already seeing around me, and an attempt to bring those elements together and tie them to my body. Whilst I do think that our experience of watching the film could be described as seeing something hidden

coming into light, an unveiling, I think this because we’re not used to having such an immediate encounter with the external world, and were not used to being forced to sit and stare at it for so long. It’s not that our sensorial experience it, so much as the film gives us such an intense sensorial experience that it moves into a space outside of our usual perception of reality. That’s why I think it has a spiritual or dreamlike feeling, not because there’s anything inherently surreal about it.

I think there is something about the film that asks you to give up your attempts to work out what it means when you’re watching it and just experience it. The central shot feels like it is held for a very long time without any real indication of anything happening. There is no event to focus our attention on, we want to look away but still the shot is held. In this way, it forces the viewer to give up their control, and passively

experience the film in a sensorial rather than intellectual way. It sort of imposes itself on you, it’s almost hypnotising, and you just have to let it happen. You can try and retrospectively apply meaning to individual components of the piece, or the piece as a whole, but I think this can only take you so far. It’s like the film doesn’t want to be defined, to be reduced to our interpretations of it, it just is.

starting point for me; I will veer off and explore other things but they

As you have remarked in your artist's statement, you are particularly interested in the exploration of

point. Firstly there is the human body, then there is everything outside

are all relative to this original encounter between body and world. I think maybe it bothers some people the way I speak about everything outside of the body- nature, physical space, other human beings etc. collectively, as the external world or external space. It can seem reductive to look at things in this way, but I think maybe that’s the of that. Although humans have needs and desires, what we attach

: what does direct you to centre a relevant part of your artistic research on this theme?

It’s difficult to say how I came to be invested in this way at looking at things. I think it’s just a way that I am able to deal with the experience of existing in the world, as a subject and as a body. It’s always the

them to is not pre-ordained, so I don’t really want to be too specific about what it is outside the body I am focusing on, because its often the case that they are unstable or even interchangeable. Is very rare that I will focus on just sex or just death, for example, it tends to be that the work is about everything at once.

I think this way of looking at the world is ultimately grounded in psychoanalysis- I am trying to understand the world through understanding the human subject. I realised this after I had already started making artwork about it- I only started reading Freud a few months ago and I’ve only just started reading Lacan now. So I wouldn’t say that it has directly influenced me, only that there are parallels. I’m very cautious about taking inspiration from material that someone else has produced, whether that be art or philosophy, because I want my work to be authentic to my experience of life as possible and not filtered through the work of others. That’s not to say that art shouldn’t be consciously aware of other significant work, only that it should originate from direct experience, rather what has already been said. I think on some level its inevitable, but I try to avoid it. I still engage with artists a lot, but it’s important to maintain a distance. There are never really collective goals, only personal ones.

It struck me a while ago that most of the artists and writers I was engaging with are white men- Kafka, Matthew Barney, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jordan Wolfson, David Lynch to name a few. I initially assumed that this was just a result of racism and misogyny- my own, in earmarking them as being ‘great’ artists, and the art world, for allowing them to succeed in their practice above other artists. I now think it also has something to do with the fact that the white man is the ultimate ‘self’ in society- the coloniser of other bodies and nature- to whom other female, and non-white bodies are ‘other’ and thus assimilated into the natural world. For some women artists or artists of colour- confrontation of their own prescribed identity as Other and the violence of that is integral to their experience of the world, so the artwork tends to be a response to this oppression. I think that it’s probably a result of my own privilege, being white and coming from quite a liberal background, having always been made to feel that what I have to say is worth listening to, that I probably associate more with the coloniser than the colonised. It would be disingenuous to say that’s not where I’ve come from. That said, I think the whole point of making this work is that I can try and transcend my own subjecthood and my body, my origin is looking out at the world as coloniser, but in doing so, I start to become aware that the world is looking back at me or that there’s a slight wavering in my sense of the self. I think this is especially true of which is why it’s such an important work for me. deviates from traditional video installation technique and provides the viewers with such a heightened visual experience that seems to reflect German photographer Andreas Gursky's words,

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers when he stated that : are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how openly would you like your works to be understood?

I don’t really think very much about how I structure my films. I think this is mainly because I’m primarily an artist, not a filmmaker. I used to write a lot of poetry, and there came a point where I thought that the poems I was writing would be better as films. So the films replaced the poems. But both come from the same place- I just get images in my head that seem to link together in some way but initially I don’t know how- the film is the way that I work out how they link together. Maybe my films can be understood better if you look at them as poems. I think they probably read better that way. I’ve never been taught how to make a film properly, so the films I make are the only type I can make. I would have no idea how to go about making a narrative film, for example. If I deviate from traditional filmmaking technique, that’s probably the reason why.

I do think that there is something about the way that I make films that means they are unsettled in meaning and deeply subjective. They nearly always consist of a series of images held for quite a long length of time, and the art occurs in the images and the relationship between them, and our own relationships to them- the meaning is internal to visuals, as opposed to the piece being an expression of an external concept like a narrative. I think the nature of means that people experience it in very different, personal ways. I think a lot of it has to do with the way it is to do with its unconventional structure; the usual structure of film is ripped away and the viewer is left to explore the space on their own.

Sound plays a relevant role in your film: marked with captivating minimalistic quality, the soundtrack provides the footage of with such an enigmatic atmosphere: how do you consider the relationship between sound and moving images?

I think sound in communion is a way of feeling the contact between the body and space as vibration in the atmosphere. The ringing sound comes from my finger rubbing against the edge of the glass, a result of that initial act of touch, and providing a soundtrack for the film. I think there is a kind of harmony between the ringing and the maggots in the wallpaper, they’re both vibrations, disturbances in space. As the maggots shot is held, the sound continues and more notes come through as some of the maggots move towards the centre. It

feels like something is coming together or being formed, because of the way we link the image and the sound. I think it almost feels like what we see and what we hear is on a verge of breaking down and seeping into each other, but before it gets to this point the film cuts back to the footage of the finger on the glass. As soon as we remember that this is where the noise is coming from, the hand pulls away and the sound cuts out. I like to think of silence as an equilibrium, and sound is the disturbance of it. So in touching something, like the glass in ,I am upsetting the natural balance, which is the sound. I think by the end of the film, there is a new, seductive, feeling of harmony, so that when the sound cuts out and the screen goes black we are left with a feeling of emptiness. That’s my experience of it anyway.

Another interesting work that we would like to introduce to our , that can be readers is entitled viewed at : reminding us of Marc Quinn's , this stimulating video initiates the viewers to a multilayered journey through . How did you come up with the idea of this stimulating work? is a sculptural piece consisting of a live leech containing 0.3 Ounces of my blood, inside a glass box half-filled with water. I was initially driven to make it because I wanted to make a piece which would enable me to physically inhabit part of my surroundings, to transcend the boundaries of my own body by appropriating the body of another living organism and using it as a vessel for myself. Art as ‘embodying’ the physical world. This narcissistic act of making the leech into an ‘art object’ is countered by the aliveness of the creature; by attempting to colonise bodies outside of my own, I encountered the leech as a sentient, autonomous being with needs and behaviours independent from me. I am able to reconcile the Other because what it wants is to suck my blood- so both of our desires are fulfilled in this mutual act. It is therefore a consummation between parasite and host- a union of two bodies that is almost sexual in that the fulfilment of the drives of both bodies is ‘becoming one’ by one physically being inside the other. By putting the leech on a plinth in a glass box that resembles both a museum display case and a fish tank- I am separating it from myself and presenting it as an object of voyeuristic observation. But we should also see this attempt as part of the sculpture. The title of the piece tells us that we should look at the leech as purely a container- that,

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

A still from

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Women Cinemakers in containing my blood, it loses its selfhood and becomes a substitute for the artist. But at the same time the leech never stops being alive; it never stops being just a leech. It swims around the glass box in its own way. The piece is therefore a negotiation between of space between the self and other, the parasite and host, bringing these two bodies into one body.

This piece is different to most of my other work. It’s also a lot easier to talk about, because intent is a bigger part of it- it is more about what it actually is and what has been done to it rather than how it looks and feels. It’s a very deliberate work. I think it came about because I wanted to do something physical, to directly engage my body with the world in an artwork, where an actual transaction would take place. I was becoming increasingly aware that whilst I was looking at the world and making artwork about it, I was also being looked at. I wanted to make something where this duality was integral to the piece. I was researching a lot into the relationship between the self and other, and how exchange between them has been explored through metaphors of consumption and excretion, particularly in vampirism. I watched a lot of horror films. Blood is a signifier of body, life and vitality- but once it leaves the body, it is abject and upsetting to look at. The act of drinking blood is a metaphor for consuming life. It seemed obvious to me that I should use leeches. I wanted to find out that if a leech drank my blood, whether the blood would be abject, because it is drawn from my body, or vital, because it is pumping around the body of the leech.

I find small living creatures like insects and invertebrates really fascinating.

Whilst we know them to be ‘alive’, our perception of them as sentient beings is ambiguous, so our feelings towards them are unsettled. It’s quite easy to be disgusted by them, or to feel empathy for them, depending on how you look at them. I think that the way humans look at nature is inherently voyeuristic; we elevate the self to being above or outside of the natural world, and arrange everything else as something for us to observe. I even think science itself may be inherently voyeuristic. There is something about our relationship to small creatures like bugs and snakes and invertebrates that seems epitomise the relationship between man and nature. We love to look at them, but only when they are safely behind glass. The glass seems to enable us to disconnect from nature, to look at it as wholly other and to create an illusion that we’re not being watched. I bought 12 leeches from a medical leech farm online and kept them as pets, all of them in a big glass jar.

One by one I started to feed them from my blood. At this point I wasn’t really sure where I was going with it in terms of a physical outcome, but I was just

letting my relationship with the leeches inform my process, writing in a diary to document the whole experience. I ended up getting really attached to my leeches. I even started whispering to them whilst they were sucking my blood. At some stage I noticed some blood in the bottom of the jar, and I realised that some of the leeches that hadn’t been fed had starting sucking my blood from the ones that had already been fed. I thought that an interesting idea for a piece could be if I fed one leech from my blood and then released it into a container full of unfed leeches and just let them all feed from each other- my blood being passed through their bodies in a continuous cycle- an ecosystem running off my blood. But I separated them to stop this from happening, because I found the thought of them feeding from each other too upsetting. In the end I decided that the best and way to realise the work was to turn a single leech into an art object by filling it with my blood. The piece was about two bodies; using more than one leech would confuse this. When I first showed the work to other people, I was concerned that it was being seen as being a disgusting and fascinating thing to look at, rather than being taken seriously as a work of art. But then I realised that this disgust and fascination was part of viewing the work, that this was all part of the experience of looking at the leech as art.

We have particularly appreciated the way your work contains that address the viewers to inquire into : how do you consider the role of for your artistic research? In particular, how do the details that you capture during daily life fuel your artistic research?

Lived experience is my only real subject matter for making work. I’ve been very aware of death for a while now, not in a nihilistic way, but the opposite; everything becomes more beautiful and poignant when you know it’s only going to last a short time. I find that if I approach making work with this in mind I am able to tap into a rhythm that seems to be already there, somewhere in-between my body and the world. I think a lot of it has to do with time, knowing how long enough to hold onto a particular image to get the most feeling out of it, like with poetry. I just think that everything is so beautiful and upsetting and making artwork seems to be the only appropriate response to all of it. You could say that I am trying to attach myself to the world through making it into artwork. I’m always looking for something to hold onto, I am looking for meaning, permanence, unity etc but there is of course a difficulty in this, in that there is never an end, complete unity is unreachable. So I think the ephemerality in my work is

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Women Cinemakers because of that- its never something I aim for but it always just is. The fact that my work feels ephemeral or that it might be really small in size is because it’s the only way it can exist- it’s the only thing that it seems right to respond with. All artwork is ephemeral in the end. Ephemeral art is the best thing we can hope for.

One of the hallmarks of your artistic research 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 decision-making process, in terms of what type of medium is used in a particular context?

The audience is always active in constituting the meaning of my work. But I don’t think about this when I’m actually making it. I like to think that most of my work originates from a place that’s beneath language or definitive meanings. When it is visualised and complete, then I want people to see it, and I’m always interested in what they think. But before that, if I were to even allow the thought of an audience to creep into the conception of the work, it would result in making decisions outside of that inner space; it would be inauthentic. Rather than allowing this to happen, I try to let my work grow organically, feeling my way through the process instinctively. When it is finished, however, the audience is critical in the work. When something is finished, I try to distance myself from the making of it as much as possible. At this stage I rarely know what to think of it myself, so I seek the interpretations of others. The work no longer belongs to me. Most of the time I find that other people have far more insightful interpretations of the work than I do.

They are able to see the work detached from the original intention or the process. Their interpretations are grounded in what is actually there. They see it as it really is, rather than as a realisation of what I intended it to be. I think that all art should be judged on first impressions. I find it ridiculous that someone visiting an art gallery might be expected to read the biography of the artist, or a long description explaining the artist’s process, to understand a work. I hope that my relationship with the audience comes from a mutual trust- the audience has to trust that I am honest in my intentions about the making of the work, and I trust that the viewer is an artist in the same way as I am, and that their interpretation of the work is always valid.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Amilia. 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 just focusing on the work I am doing right now, with the expectation that it will lead me to my next step. I’m working on a few different things. I’m currently very obsessed with greyhounds. I’ve been doing some drawings of greyhounds and I wrote a poem about one and I’m now starting some oil paintings of greyhounds. I think they’re beautiful, and they know exactly what you’re thinking when they look at you. But I’m worried that I’m not good enough of a painter to capture the essence of the greyhound. I’m also making a film, which is going on in the ; where I’m background, and I’m also doing a project called writing 1 poem a week and send it out to my mailing list every Sunday.

There’s something really warm and sad about Sundays. I think it’s because Sunday feels like an ending, and that it forces you to reflect on your life in a way you probably don’t want to. It’s always been the most creative day for me. I wanted to cement that feeling into my creative process, so that the poems could be markers of the passing of time.

I’m still very early on in my creative life. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know what kind of art I wanted to be making. At the moment, I feel like I do know, but that could change. And I want to allow myself that freedom to change direction if it feels right. I think a lot of artists get good at doing one thing really well and keep doing it to the point where it loses its original urgency and rawness and just dries up. I hope that I never come to take my art so seriously that I wouldn’t be able to stop everything and start again if I had to. I think it’s part of my condition that I never get really ‘good’ at anything technically- whether its painting, filmmaking or writing poems- I because I only ever work out how to do something well enough to carry out a single idea. I’m not interested in being good at anything beyond that. I think I’m often unwilling to attempt to make anything that would involve me having to properly learn a skill, because I prefer to work in a way where I can navigate everything instinctively. Even though I aspire to a highly-crafted aesthetic, its always done in a very low-tech way. I barely even know how to work a camera. I think I will always feel like an amateur in that sense. But I think that there is something quite liberating in my acceptance of that. It allows me to flow freely between mediums and processes without feeling like I have to respect any pre-existing frameworks or traditions. I can’t see myself ever ‘specialising’ in any way for that reason.

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

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Women Cinemakers meets

Sasha Dixon In Finnbarr Projection I questioned if an artist can encapsulate a person in their work and show an accurate interpretation to their audience. Although complete truth isn’t possible, there will be some truth in the artist’s perception. How does an artist’s work change as they learn more about their subjects?

I hoped to create an understanding between the subject and audience meanwhile allowing the audience to relate and answer the questions themselves.

I wanted to show the process of a painting I made, the changes that happen when learning about sitter, to show that relationship. By showing process I have been able to encourage my audience to think of how they interpret the art as well as the effect of my perception of the sitter.

This will hopefully allow my audience to question if they’re a part of the artistic process, or are artists themselves as they contemplate concepts of work. In my work I questioned if not being there when the interview is being done changes the outcome, the effects of working from film, photography or life. Lastly, is the final outcome more my perception of the person or them?

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Marked out with captivating multidisciplinary feature, London based artist and experimental filmmaker Sasha Dixon's artistic research is directed to inquire into the themes of human perception and artist-spectator

relationship. In her captivating Finnbarr Projection she encourages her audience to think of how they interpret the art as well as the effect of my perception of the sitter. One of the most captivating aspects of Dixon's practice is its ability create hightened visual experience and cross-pollination of the spectatorship: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Sasha and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum dued to your studies at the Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts direct your artistic research and the themes you explore in your artworks?

I’m very blessed to have studied with such amazing tutors on my Foundation Course in Art at Oxford City College; I had an Art History teacher who taught me a great deal about film and opened me up to new ideas and genres that I was previously unaware of such as French New Wave, and more modern contemporary art. In regard to my environment, I think it’s really important to be surrounded by other creatives as it can be a source of inspiration and confidence. London is such a catalyst for creativity and a constant source of inspiration, whether that be the Prince Charles Cinema or The Moth Club, or even somewhere more obvious like The National Gallery and all of those galleries hidden away in the West End. I find myself constantly confronted with the need to be creative amidst this city. But to me this is all secondary to my partner and siblings as I regard them as my greatest motivation as they are incredibly supportive and understanding. My partner is also passionate about film, and so there is a common understanding of the importance of creativity and perseverance as well as being experimental and constantly looking to improve.

For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting experimental video that our readers have already started

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Women Cinemakers 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 is the way the results of your artistic research provides the viewers with such a captivating visual experience. of While walking our readers through , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

It may be controversial to say as a contemporary artist, but I adore portraiture and the process of painting and drawing portraits, which was challenged significantly when I first went to college in Oxford. My college education allowed me to question the validity of portraiture and the ability to capture someone in a portrait, as well as my own personal love for the technicality of drawing a portrait. I’m drawn to portraiture because I’m interested in people’s experiences, and I suppose when I first started college I had the belief that a portrait could hold a person entirely, but of course this belief has been broken down (although a certain essence remains) so I looked to explore this in my work. The turning point was when interviewing my brother Finnbarr, that although I knew him deeply, the portrait was inadequate in its presentation of this knowledge. On top of this, came the realisation that I didn’t know about him, because I am not him. How dare I imply absolute understanding to my audience, by leaving a finished painting in a gallery space, in colour, and lead them to believe they know him as well? I also questioned how much my sitter had affected the painting, which lead

me to consider him a part of the creative process, which then had implications in terms of how the audience too are a part of this process – they are at last left to perceive the painting as I perceived the sitter.

Addressing the viewer to question the nature of our perceptual process, also urges the viewers to rethink to the elusive bond between the individual and outside reality: how do you consider the relationship between perceptual reality and our ?

I consider perceptual reality and inner landscape in some ways the same as we experience reality entirely through our individual perceptions which are shaped by our past experiences and opinions. In my opinion, the difference occurs between reality and perceptual reality, although perceptual reality is all that we know, and what shapes our inner landscape. Equally though, our inner landscape is what forges our perceptual reality, so the two are related in a cyclical sense, which is why in some regards I would view them as the same. This realisation

that my perception may not be necessarily true of a person is what led me to explore my own ability to paint portraits, if they are not based in fact. Yet, perhaps because it is my own perception, that is where my involvement in the artistic process begins.

An interesting aspect of your 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 . 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?

In this film I questioned if an artist can encapsulate a person in their work and show an accurate interpretation to their audience. Although complete

truth isn’t possible, there will be some truth in the artist’s perception. How does an artist’s work change as they learn more about their subjects? I hoped to create an understanding between the subject and audience, meanwhile allowing the audience to relate and answer the questions themselves. I suppose I wanted my audience to consider their own experiences and question if what they perceive is truth, through asking confronting questions as I did in the interview with Finnbarr. I wanted to show the process of a painting I made, the changes that happen when learning about the sitter, to show that relationship. By showing process I have been able to encourage my audience to think of how they interpret the art as well as the effect of my perception of the sitter. This will hopefully allow my audience to question if they’re a part of the artistic process, or are artists themselves as they contemplate concepts of work. In my work I questioned if not being there when the interview is being done changes the outcome, the effects of working from film, photography or life. I want my work to be understood as something that requires dialogue and interpretation, rather than mere statements of supposed fact.

How does your personal experience fuel your creative process? In particular, how would you consider the relationship between direct interaction with other people and your creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from perceptual reality?

In the way that one’s inner landscape affects their perceptual reality, my personal experiences affect my

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art. As of yet, I’ve been unable to create art that is objective rather than subjective. This is not to say that such a separation is impossible, but a great deal of my art is based on my own interpretations – maybe I should look to explore themes that have a less personal connection if I want to be more objective, but I’m not convinced that this is something that I would want. On the whole, my art is reliant on its ability to interact with others, as without this element of questioning and multiple layers of interpretation and perception, it would not resonate with an audience.

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 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?

By its nature the internet allows the opportunity for connection and broadened viewership of art works, but I cannot help but be saddened that my piece is not nearly as effective online as it was in the gallery space. I think the scale of the projection and the setting of a gallery encourages the audience to engage with the art in a more meaningful and direct way, there is more of a sense of occasion and importance to the art in such a setting as well, which is perhaps lost in an elusive online setting. That being said, the internet removes any barriers between art

and its audience, meaning that it can be for almost everyone, as it should be, rather than those who have the opportunity to view art in person. My greatest grievance would be the loss of tension that occurs in the gallery when the audience witnesses the process of a painting, but there is no painting to be found, as it subverts expectations in a way that is not applicable to an online setting. I’m not sure if somewhere like YouTube is a very good setting for my piece in particular, as it is essentially lost in the sea of content on the site. Perhaps a setting that would cater to such niches would be more appropriate, but at the same time, this could arguably create the same issue that we see in the gallery in that it is in some ways putting the piece in a setting outside of the view of the general public.

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 ' ', 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?

I’ve never particularly thought of myself as an unconventional artist, just that I do art. Sometimes I have good ideas, and at other times I don’t, but I like to work through them and explore the avenues that they present. I’m very lucky to even have that opportunity, seemingly without restriction. Growing up with 6 brothers who are all interested in art gave me the idea that it didn’t matter if I was a woman or not, and I’m lucky that my university is so welcoming and does not

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discriminate against female artists, unlike some of my tutors have experienced in their education and in the industry. Perhaps I haven’t experienced this yet due to these safe places, and it is possible that in the future I might gain first-hand experience.

One of the most empowering moments I’ve had as an artist is when my Art History teacher taught me about female artists and their effect on art, even though they may not have been recognised at the time. He introduced me to my favourite photographer Francesca Woodman, and encouraged me to see Louise Bourgeois’ work in person, because until then most of my influences were male. Clearly women have always been crucial in the art world, but it seems that now we are not only allowed to create art, but are encouraged to do so, and to still challenge boundaries.

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

I’ve just finished a collaborative art show in London with female peers at Chelsea. The experience was wonderful, and I can’t wait to do more shows. My art has continued to question perception, but more in terms of where that comes from, and how memory affects our perception. I’ve also moved into other mediums such as textiles and written word (poetry) as the making process continues to fascinate me, but I most certainly do see myself making short films in the future, as it has capabilities that other mediums do not.

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

Women Cinemakers meets

Evi Stamou Lives and works in Athens, Greece

I have a mainly cinematic background, having studied filmmaking at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos. In the immediate years after my graduation (2013) I redirected my interest towards experimental and expanded cinema practices. Those formative experiences fueled a desire to explore in more depth the aesthetic boundaries between traditional cinematic forms and the evolving landscape of visual art.

The non-systematical combination of elements from different artistic fields and practices informs my broader approach to creative work, which is firmly and strictly rooted in chaos and improvisation.

Trying to put order to this chaos, I never fully abandoned the main principles of storytelling (even if presented in their abstract form) and the narrative and discursive drive that gives to other non-descriptive arts, like music, their coherence. I work with an array of widely different cameras and visual styles, employing in my work any piece of equipment I can get my hands on, from old mobile phones to webcams to consumer camcorders, always with an underlying theme and interest in mind: the study of the relation between the individuals and the surrounding environment shaping their existence, between the life of the mind and the concrete truths of reality.

These preoccupations have led to a dual, but not necessarily conflicting, predilection for works dealing with the social and practical constraints inherent in the ideas of both body and landscape. As a woman I attempt to come to terms with the limitations and the reductive set of rules to which I have to comply because of the body I was born with. As a Greek person I try to understand my home country's urban and natural landscape, one that I see as a conflicted mental space trying to break free from the heavy shadow of Western paradigms, in order to rebuild its repressed connections to the Mediterranean, Balkan and Middle-Eastern worlds.

Most of my works deal in some way with these themes.

womencinemaker@berlin.com

Stavrakos: how did this experience influenced your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to your Greek roots direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

Hello Evi and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied filmmaking at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School

In Greece, that particular kind of cinephilia that is rooted in French film theory has been at the center of cultural life for many decades, until very recently. The Film School I attended was always one the most important institutions supporting that

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

tradition: the teachers were mainly veteran critics, directors and film professionals belonging to that milieu. Attending it provided me with all the advantages and disadvantages that such an education can bear.

It provided an awareness to key aspects of the nature of the moving image that sometimes Art Schools and Universities disregard or look down on (its power of fascination, its lighthearted confusion between deception and identification, its aspiration to not only represent, but truly embody reality). At the same time I had trouble identifying with that tradition, the one that sees Bresson-Rossellini-Renoir as forefathers, the European arthouse film orthodoxy, so to speak, for the simple reason that it never really felt like my own. I think that finding a personal voice inside that culture is a difficult thing for a woman to do.

Thankfully one of the teachers, Thanassis Vassiliou, a brilliant academic, now a tenured professor in Poitiers, provided us with a fresher take on film history, one that could combine the study of classic Nouvelle Vague films to that of the work of the great American experimental filmmakers, which was a thing that back then, in 2009, was not that usual in Greece. The history of experimental and extended cinema felt immediately closer to me. I only believed that I could become a filmmaker myself when I first saw the films of Peter Kubelka.

For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected There is no one online, a stimulating experimental 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 the issue of self-image in the internet age is the way it provides the viewers with such an multilayered visual experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of There is no one online, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

It all starts, usually, when I get carried away by the discovery of a new camera or technique or location, and I spend some days of shooting just looking to expand the formal possibilities that I am given. I accumulate a lot of raw material from different shooting sessions, which stays stored in a hard drive, often for months, until I decide to go through it with my assistant, Pietro Radin, who is thankfully a film editor and isn't easily scared by the volume and eclecticism of the

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Women Cinemakers footage. We then try to recognize patterns or narratives and to elaborate more deliberately on choices that during the first sessions were for the most part instinctive. I then usually do a reshoot of some of the material and/or add something that is altogether new, based on observations and ideas developed after the viewing. I spent weeks struggling to understand the footage that was to become 'There is no one online'. I originally intended for it to be the straightforward recording of a performance, but something felt wrong. The film truly came to life only when I realized that the true potential of the material lied in the idea of combining the familiar and frustrating image of a frozen screen, suffering from bad lag and breaking up, to the form of the photographic slideshow (which is a type of video I like a lot!). I was looking for an interesting way to combine still and moving image in a video for quite some time, so the realization felt like an evidence.

Inspired by Francis Bacon's study of the human figure, your work deviates from usual experimental videomaking to question the idea of identity and its deep yet conflictual relationship with the notion of physicality in the ephemeral digital realm. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, digital distortion was added during the phase of video processing, thanks to an unplanned media player malfunction: how do you consider the creative role of randomness and improvisation within your artistic practice?

And how do you consider the relation between the digital and the real?

Writing and editing, two production stages that almost define cinema (even in experimental, performance or multimedia pieces) can sometimes feel like constraints – they can be used to limit the possibilities that the actual shooting could open up. For that reason I try to be as free as possible during the sessions. I believe the relation that film (and video) has to chance is still one of the most fascinating advantages of working with the medium – and not just during production. I love it when projections go wrong, when the pure and abstract visual qualities of a film clash with the tangible and accidental limitations of technical reproduction: there seems to be a revelation about the true nature of cinema hidden there, in a way I couldn't explain. You can imagine my delight when during a viewing on a laptop

I don't usually employ for work, the unexpected malfunction I mentioned provided me with what ended up being the formal device of the film.

Because of my propensity for working with low-fi or unreliable or damaged digital equipment I often fail to see the ''disembodied'' quality that others recognize in the digital image. Even a software malfunction has something very physical, let alone a broken sensor, which to me retains all of the mystique that we used to associate with expired film. Espousing the idea that modern technology is somehow incorporeal is what generates the confusion that makes some consider the digital image as a truer than truth substitute to reality.

We dare say that There is no one online could be considered an effective allegory of human experience in our media driven

societies: would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be understood?

Much of the effort that I put into viewing, editing and rewriting the material is aimed at singling out gestures and filmic events that resist an unambiguous and univocal reading, while still suggesting a thematic coherence able to hold the whole piece together. I am particularly happy with the way the ending turned out, in this aspect: I wanted that moment to be as open as possible, but still be meaningful and feel like a resolution. No two spectators have given the same interpretation of it, but all they felt it clarified in retrospect their personal reading of the whole film. Each viewer gives priority to different meanings, depending on what they

respond more, and they understand the film accordingly. I would to like present the viewer with concepts that are not links of a fixed and irreversible hierarchy, but whose importance and prominence in the film can be restructured at will.

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 political system you're living under": does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment?

For an artist working in Greece, figuring out that response is the most crucial task. The difficulty that Greek artists face, in trying to convincingly elaborate the cultural moment they live in, has been noted many times. Many Greek artists long to participate as equals in the European and north American cultural debate and I

can see them struggling to live up to a faceless transnational western identity, which is an identity that, to be honest, I don't fully recognize. I am not suggesting, naturally, the need for some sort of national artistic school, which, now that we are all concerned witnesses to the dangerous rise of sovranism, would be an even greater mistake. I'm merely suggesting that Greece has always had a very close relation with the other Mediterranean countries, with the rest of the Balkans, with the Middle East. These geographical places, that to a western European are nothing but fetishized, imaginary places of 'otherness', they are very much real to us: we share the same music, the same food, the same sense of humor. Many aspects of our everyday life have been shaped by the shared experiences and values of the Eastern Mediterranean world. I'm not saying that Greece has nothing to do with Western

Europe (they credit us for providing them with their world view, after all), but all I can say is that in the end it's much easier for me to identify with and feel represented in a Turkish or Egyptian film, than in a French or a Danish one, to tell you the truth. Maybe it is a subjective feeling, because there aren’t that many Greek artists that share it.

Inquiring into how rapid and dramatic transformation affect our contemporary age, There is no one online subtly questions the relationship between the private and the public sphere.

Paradoxically, it seems that in our ever changing contemporary age everyone appears to be more isolated despite being more connected. How do you consider the issue of the perception of the self in relation to the augmented experience provided by new media?

First of all, I have to say that, being a filmmaker, I have no issue with falsehood, deception and theater and I don't mind a reasonable amount of these notions to be used to spice up the way we interact in society. What shocks me is the lack of inventiveness, variety and humor in the public presentation of our digital selves.

I think that one day, looking back, this whole thing would feel as staged and stiff as a Victorian ball. The never ending set of tiny but dehumanizing rules that govern how we present ourselves online is overwhelming. Each of us has created their online self as a customized oppressive role model, which is always more beautiful, more happy, successful, well dressed and even thinner than us, that is never interested in anything stupid or boring, that doesn't talk about personal shortcomings and failures, that describes a regular day of drinking coffee and going to work as an unparalleled achievement in th life. In the 20 century they were fond of the clichĂŠ that we all wear a mask in society. Now that mask is glued to our face. To me, most of all, it all seems so needlessly serious. That was one the first sparks for the film: I thought that appearing ugly on a webcam, combing your unkempt hair, to a date that is waiting for you, is not just an act of mischief, but one of subversion. I'd rather make a funny face than become a 'cute' one. I also like to think that the character I embody in the film finds an unexpected ally in the malfunctioning webcam, which by making her face and body indiscernible, gives her a moment

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Women Cinemakers of rest from the male eyes that are constantly preying upon any woman's online image.

If I sound a little fed up with the ubiquitous sexism of modern online life and social media, it also because I can't get over the fact that the origin story of this whole era starts with an idiot rating women's faces, in matches against each other, for fun: a truly perfect visual metaphor, a chilling, sexist violation of image, privacy and self that both predates and explains all the other ones that were to follow.

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?

I understand that in terms of the consumption and distribution of an artistic product, we are witnessing a revolution. Yet, as with aviation or with cinema itself, it is merely the practical fulfillment of a very old dream: in the artist's mind, the audience was always a virtual image, composite, infinite in its potential, and full of contradictions, well before the advent of online technology. The most positive development is the fact that underground, experimental and nonconventional films, whose visibility was once confined to a few festival screenings, are now available to a much larger audience. My instinct is to wish for an even larger one, but niche markets have made works that weren't profitable before into economically viable products: I only hope this will become an unexpected source for more freedom and independence for creators and producers alike.

Not having any power over the conditions in which the viewer chooses to experience the film does not worry me very much. I've seen my work play at the wrong time for the wrong people and my experience was not one of frustration. A key concept elaborated in traditional film theory that I still hold dear is the one that advocates the uniqueness of each projection: the misunderstanding between the audience and an artist's

work can certainly make for a unique and often thrilling experience.

I'm sure home viewing will produce very interesting and unexpected encounters.

It's important to mention that you co-organizes the activities of Latomeio Project, an artistic collective that aims to bring together people with different artistic backgrounds and to promote new forms of art: it's no doubt that interdisciplinary 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. What did address you to involve people from different disciplines? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines?

I never thought that my personal projects alone would be enough to make me happy. I enjoy working on commission and exploiting all the fascinating possibilities that film and video can give you when they are employed in a subordinate role to other arts. Being the undisputed head of a project, the person whose inspiration is responsible for everybody's success – a.k.a. the stereotypical director – is not a role that I can undertake. LatoMeio Project gave me the opportunity to collaborate with Greek performance artist and acrobat Eleni Danesi: the way performance art and video work together is a refreshing reminder that film still retains the same power of documentation that created the need for cinema in the first place. For me, since in my films I start mostly from form, the collaboration with an artist from a different discipline gives me the opportunity to work most closely on content. To find and isolate the essentials in an image, to highlight with simplicity and immediacy all the readings it has to convey, is a difficult but rewarding task.

Before deciding to attend film school, I used to be a professional musician (I played the stringed instrument called Santouri, commonly employed in the traditional music of Greece, Russia, Iran and India).

Music is, I feel, the art that is the least hypocritical about its supposed autonomy: we all know that a concert is not just music but theater

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

A still from

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Women Cinemakers too; that a classical pianist is also a showman and conductors are performers themselves. Musicians are often ready to admit that only with singing or acting or dancing, music can become whole. Maybe it is because of this background that I think of the moving image in similar terms. I like it when one of my videos can accompany a dancer or a tightrope walker or a guitarist in their work: it feels more familiar to see something I created as part of a show, instead of it being an isolated object on a screen.

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: as an artist interests in the cinematic arts with feminist theory, 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?

Fortunately my personal experience was a very very lucky one. I met my closest collaborators right away (in film school) and nobody ever seriously objected to the direction I chose. It probably helps that Greek Cinema has a long tradition of women directors leading the most radical fringes of the avant-garde (Antouanetta Aggelidi and Athina Rachel Tsangari would be the most famous ones to an international audience): a young woman aspiring to emulate their passion for a groundbreaking vision of cinema, is therefore not an unusual sight. My collaborators (I need to mention at least the composer George Hatzimichelakis, whose beautiful music accompanies most of my films) absolutely shared my goals: every time I felt the pressure of conformity fall on myself and my work, this group of people stood by me, and actively encouraged me to follow an unconventional path.

My experience of the industry is of course less rosy but I still never faced anything so blatantly misogynistic as to discourage a young artist/director to follow her path. My greatest grudge, should I have one, is mostly with the Greek institutions (in every artistic discipline, not just film) that are still too shy to move away from outdated canons that are antithetical both to the plight for equality and to the search for

innovative and contemporary artistic ideas. Now that older cultural paradigms are failing, I believe that the people that were so far excluded from them are the natural candidates to indicate the evolution that artistic creation should take in the future. As you suggested, we are not starting from scratch, since there is a clandestine history of art, which runs parallel to the official one, where we see women artists making the most of their 'uncommonness' and unconventionality, in spite of the efforts to restrain their creativity. Seeing the past contribution of these women finally recognized, and witnessing growing opportunities for women artists today, I can only feel optimistic: women have stood their ground against calls for normalcy and conformism (in life and in art) for centuries, it is now their time to teach the 'majority' how to speak with the voice of the outsider.

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

So far I've focused exclusively on small scale works. My lengthiest video is 13 minutes long, I think. So, I'm trying to look for ways to grasp longer forms. I'm not sure if small adjustments to my method will do: the approach to writing, especially, has to be different. I am very interested in the new forms of documentary filmmaking, and I am following very closely the new ideas that the creators in this field are exploring.

In addition to my work as a director, I am also involved, lately, in a new collective space that has just been founded in Athens, called Balkan Can Kino, mostly as a film programmer for non-fiction works. Since I think that the directors of today cannot just be isolated creators, I believe that my evolution will be influenced from the way in which I will be able to interact with the stimuli that the changing artistic landscape of my city will present.

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

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers meets

Ainsley Tharp Lives and works in San Francisco, CA, USA

Ainsley Elizabeth Tharp (B.F.A., University of Iowa, 2012-2016) is an innovative, aspiring director/choreographer in the niche art of artistic expression involving movement. Based in San Francisco, she works as an independent film editor and co-founder of a dance company called Postcompany. Ainsley and Jonah Kagan, her creative collaborator, use Postcompany to explore abnormal performative climates through the means of improvisation. As an internationally recognized and experienced artist, she has performed in spaces such as SomoS Arthouse in Berlin, Germany, The Sardine in San Francisco, and with The Indeterminacy Festival in Iowa City. Currently, Ainsly is investigating the ecosystem of performative spaces by examining the means through which symbiosis can be reached as the moving body is embedded in an environment of multimedia artistic expressions while exploring boundaries between artist and audience.

Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography mixes the ordinary and the surreal which guides the viewer into a parallel universe via a microwave microcosm. The absurdity of the unknown gleams on the corks of a moving “body” in a multidimensional environment in which technology seems to be lost in space and time. The visual experience becomes a sensory overload as the viewer surveys the peregrinations of the alien’s journey to nowhere.

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

Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography is a captivating short experimental dance film by San Francisco based director and choreographer Ainsley Elizabeth Tharp: through sapient combination between sci-fi fantasy and a dance, her film expresses the resonance between human body and the environment, providing the viewers with a multilayered experience, to encourage cross-pollination of the spectatorship. One of the most interesting aspects of Tharp's approach is the way it urges the spectatorship to explore the relationship between our perceptual process and the outside

world. and we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Ainsley and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would invite our readers to visit https://www.aineliztharp.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we we would like to start this interview with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a B.F.A. in Choreography and Movement practices, that you received from University of Iowa: how did this experience influence your evolution as a multidisciplinary? Moreover, does your multifaceted cultural background direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

The University of Iowa allowed me to be curious. An unconventional approach to learning drove me to take classes I was interested in, which is why I walked out with just a BFA in dance. I remember reaching a point in my academic career and thinking ‘I have so many resources at my fingertips, what could I possibly build and create in such a limited amount of time. After this revelation, I felt compelled to get involved in everything I was piqued my interest. I spent a whole semester choreographing an unsung disco-opera, took an intro to film course, took a projection design course, and I produced a few of my own works off campus. This space was such a little incubator to explore and test things out. Nothing was weighed like it would have been in the real world. The University of Iowa gave me the experience I needed to figure out what I want and how to ask for it, especially as women.

For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography, an extremely interesting experimental dance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once impressed us of your insightful inquiry into the resonance between human body and environment is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such captivating aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

I am curious about creating an entire ecosystem for my work to exist in, both in film and in performance. My work plays on different frequencies and channels within a movement landscape. The environment I set up transcends the liminal space that has traditionally been set aside for performance. By exploring the means through which symbiosis can be reached as the moving body is embedded in an environment of multimedia artistic expressions, the work becomes a microcosm for the viewer to peer into and occasionally become apart of.

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers The initial idea represents a landmark of exploration within my artistic practice at the time. Everything becomes a part of the process, which then I ask myself “are you ever not in a creative process?” the answer to that question is probably no. I’ve began to notice that everything I do is a part of my artistic practice. My work has bled into how I live life and how I live life has become my work, which is something I’m still learning to utilize productively. However, this struggle gives the work the ebbs and flows that are its strength. The work becomes a reflective pool for life.

Sometimes I’ll go a whole day traveling through the city as a performative experiment, dancing an invisible dance for my current work-in-progress.

This type of obsessive curiosity about people and their reaction to the abstract within daily movements keeps the city interesting for me. These experiments then become a part of the work and creative process in sourcing movement material.

Summer 2017: At the time of Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography creation My friend Dot and I were curious about exploring our creative chemistry. Dot is a writer, choreographer and dancer based out of NYC (the star of the film). All of the artists involved in this project were living in Iowa at the time. This work become a utilization of resources and the creative energy that swirls around Iowa City.

Dot was attracted to the fossil gorge (location) and I was attracted to editing styles of late 60s sci-fi. We talked about exploring ideas about being trapped in an androgynous brain in a female body. We were both interested in exploring an aesthetic related to Pina Bausch.

We entertained ideas involving big dresses, considered scenes reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s iconic works. The phenomenon of dreams about falling or falling into your dreams caught our attention, but we abandoned the Bausch stuff and instead expanded the concept into the realm of surrealism and sci-fi. The epic thrift store session that ultimately changed the direction of the project consisted of Dot relentlessly trying on dresses that didn’t fit--a hilarious and frustrating meditation on gender that hit a dead end in the fitting rooms of Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Thrown for a loop by circumstance, we wondered, where does a body go when it can’t be contained within the confines of expected or typical gender boundaries? Our answer: another planet. The dreamscape we constructed

at the fossil gorge referenced the campy escapism of 1960’s sci-fi and foregrounded an exploration of anonymous androgyny. My alien roved the deserted landscape, revelled in the solitude of discovery, performed discreet surveys of a territory at once somewhere and nowhere. Scale, color, and duration proved important variables in this experiment. The film allowed the alien to exist as both larger than life and infinitesimally tiny in a site where time stalled and looped.

nowhere. This strange little liberal anomaly that is Iowa city

It was not until after the film was finished that I realized Joseph Normans music was the perfect fit for this bizarre experiment, This work was our ode to Iowa, where we had spent the last four years. In some ways Iowa was the place of somewhere and

consistent points of convergence: how do you consider the

became the perfect inspiration for this out-of-this-world excursion.

Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography sapiently mixes reality and fiction into what seems like fragments of a dream, to draw the viewers through a multilayered journey in the liminal area where the real and the imagined find relationship between reality and imagination playing with in your artistic practice?

My imagination has a huge influence on my reality. I become so fixated on a dream or a vision of a work. I am fascinated at being somewhere and nowhere all at the same time. My work usually is conceived in an ethereal state. I get lost in between being asleep and awake thinking about my next work or an idea, replaying the same idea or sequence over and over and over again in my mind. The dream work shape shifts as the concept behind different improvisational scores play out in my head. The work guides me through the physically emotional procedure until it becomes a reality, then the work floods everything that I do. At no point is the process static, my works are in constant motion, even my pieces that “finished” are never really done.

For example, with Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography I couldn’t quite figure out how to end it. The work needed that space to breathe, so I picked up a few other projects cycled through a different process then, I realized that the world had to manifest through a microwave. I tried out different microwave set ups, the microwave in the classic kitchen, the microwave as a television, then it hit me the microwave in the Texas desert, perfect. The absurdity of my dreams become the reality of my work. I think that obsessive nature of dreaming gives the work an ethereal quality.

We have appreciated the way your approach to dance video conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of choreography and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does improvisation play in your process?

When it comes to necessity spontaneity is always the answer (in my work).

D: When you’re watching dance, you’re watching the dancer thinking-and what the choreographer has thought. Improvisation lends a live element to the performative experience and involves the audience by default, since the viewers constructs the space in which the dancers work.

Collaboration includes the audience, too. The creation of a work-especially improvisationally--depends upon the exchange between performer, environment, and viewer. Sourcing interactions from diverse audiences is crucial for support and artistic integrity. Film offers the advantage of accessibility: it’s easier to watch a film than to attend a sitespecific dance performance in many situations. Though film sacrifices the liminal aspect of live performance, it captures moments of spontaneity and locates them in a permanent place. Having a physical record of ephemeral physical art is crucial, especially in an era replete with screens and digital archives.

The work that I feel drawn to the most is work that has complexity within the vulnerability of movement. Spontaneity gives the work vulnerability and a raw inherent truth. The brain and the body are alive in that present movement of improvisation. I do believe in giving the work intention, but no explanation. The intention that set up this piece in particular was absurdity within uncertainty, magnetism, deep space, and the complexity of dimensionality.

The process existed in a studio… kinda. We played with ideas and gestures that were far out and otherworldly. There were movements that we would come up with as if we did not exist in a human body. Dot and I improvised together catching these movement ideas off of each other.

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers When we started to move at the fossil gorge, the movement became more nuanced and specific to the site. Of course the time in the studio helped shape and guide the direction we ended up going, but there's something to be said for how a space shapes a dance and how a dance shapes a space. The environment became more than just a set, it developed its own character.

Improvisation was a part of the process the whole time. We happened to find a mylar jumpsuit and some silly space glasses a few weeks after I had an impromptu conversation about extraterrestrial life with my step-dad. My experience seems to seep into the work, whether I am conscious of it or not. I think by allowing freedom within the work to improvise allows the work to develop a life of its own - this whole “ecosystem/ biome” idea that I mentioned early. We become the vessel for the work to live through.

Sound plays a crucial role in your video and we have highly appreciated the way it provides the footage with such an ethereal and enigmatic atmosphere, capable of challenging the viewers' perceptual categories: how would you consider the relationship between performative gestures and sound?

Now, I’m going to let my sound designer Joseph Norman help answer this question. I brought him on board knowing this would be a work he could breathe life into. The sound was such an enigma for a long time. I sent Joseph footage and he really helped set the tone of the work. “The relationship of sound and gesture is multi-tiered. On one level sound provides a sonic universe that encapsulates the visual activity. At this level the sound acts as commentary and communication with the film itself, providing a aural interpretation of the overall form. With a global sound structure established to delineate film segments, attention was given to ornamental sounds that could highlight specific visual details, e.g. visual distortions, changes of perspective, and cuts. A third level exists in the form of voiced material that adds opaque and non-linear explication to the narrative. It also provides augmented tension and repose due to the fluctuation of distortion density over the course of the piece.” Joseph Norman.

Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography has drawn heavily from the specifics of its environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such powerful resonance between environment and

choreographic gestures. How do you consider the relationship between environment and your creative process?

The environment is just as much of a collaborator as anyone else. In a loose improvisational score, the environment inspires and creates an ambiance for the movement to exist in and with. The environment becomes a habitat for inspiration that can’t be found in the studio. The habitat then takes on these shape-shifting qualities, if you allow it.

Everything from the wind to the texture of the rock you’re walking on provides tangible material for an artist to work with. There's this trend happening in dance film right now, where the environment becomes the backdrop or the set for movers to dance in front of. For me, this lacks dimensionality. Pina Bausch once said, “I’m not interested in how people move but what moves them.” Now, I am curious about the space as a whole, how can a dancer play with the physical space and how does the space playback? I find myself attracted to work that works in conversation and co creation with the environment, here we go again, the the self-sustained “ecosystem.” I feel like this is going to be a theme that will perpetually haunt me. Film is so fascinating to me, because it captures these moments in a time capsule within the ecosystem.

In Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography you sapiently mix choreographic gestures with the surreal qualities of the ambience, and we have appreciated the way such coherent combination addresses your audience to a multilayered experience. Art historial Ernst Gombrich once underlined the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so that they can actively participate in the creation of the illusion: how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood?

Once my work becomes a reality, it becomes a guide and a frame for the viewer to project into. I’m not trying to drive a point home, especially with this work. There's no main focus or idea I want to convey. This work is an offering and an opportunity. The quirks and nuances of the piece allow others to be actively involved in deciphering it for themselves. I’m not trying to compromise the complexity of this work with its absurdity.

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Women Cinemakers I’m hoping to evoke curiosity and conversation. When I encounter work I don’t understand or doesn’t quite settle with me I am pushed to ask why.

Art needs ambiguity for personal associations. The ambiguity of the work allows the viewer to create their own journey and relationship to the illusion that is the work. I am trying to cultivate a type of response that I find in my own personal daily practice. I am always conscious of the ideas that I am considering during a process, which is why I give intention and not explanation to my work and collaborators.

D: For conceptual work like this film, it’s crucial to have a framework with little furniture, especially in the early stages of creation. Too much detail can stunt a brainy project’s growth. If there’s a larger structure or plan, the minutiae can fall into place--we can allow the minutiae to fall into place and not get too hung up on the small things. For me, the freedom to roam around in Ainsley’s “environment” and respond to her prompts with movement and discussion sourced from my own experiences caused me to make choices that were pertinent yet fresh. My contributions felt as if they were of the environment but not restricted to it. When you play with absurdity, having a conceptual grasp of what you’re going for means free rein to experiment.

The work is a reflection of who I am at that moment in time, as well as a reflection of the people I am working with.

This type of projection elicits vulnerability and honesty, creating a reflecting pool within the work. The audience then becomes a part of the development of the illusion. I view my work more as an experiment than a product. This takes the weight off of my shoulders and allows the work freedom to play, which is where the absurdity in uncertainty leaks in.

I’m not interested in making the type of work that hits the viewer across the head and screams ”THIS IS WHAT THIS IS ABOUT!”. I am curious about the instinctive reactions of the audience to work that is ambivalent. I am fascinated by the residue of feelings and thoughts a work is capable of leaving behind.

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 "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the ideas you explore and the physical act of creating your artworks?

Dance is a strong foundation for my work. It’s a practice that has been apart of my life since I was 3. I am constantly asking questions on how the movinging body can deepen the human experience. Dance is my ritual and my strongest practice, which bleeds into all of my other artistic practices. Dance is transliminal which is why dancers have this beautiful gift of understanding what cannot be said, but can be shown and felt.

There are moments that I can only express through feeling the movement/dancing. All of my work I do is an amalgamation of the physical and the transcendental. I try to capitalize on the transliminal space of art, focusing on the lived experience of both the performer and the audience. I am currently researching and experimenting with live performance that stimulates the audience to get up and physically be involved and apart of the performative space.

As you have remarked once, Collection is no Longer Limited by Geography was conceived in a costume store, and then became a collaborative experiment between dancer, director, and sound editor: it's no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations as the one that you have established over the years are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your practice? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines?

I am constantly fascinated by collaboration in contemporary art. For me, collaboration is investing in other artists and their theories. I feel like at times different mediums and artforms have a tendency to exist within their own “echo chambers.� In my experience, the space to exchange ideas only has deepened my own artistic practice. I find myself most

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers connected to others while we share in the process of creating. To co-create something is a beautiful practice of compassion and humility. I think I am so drawn to dance for this reason. Dance is inherently a social art form; you take class with a group of people, share in this bewitching experience, and participate in the co-creation of space and movement.

This work in particular was made possible by the strong artistic voices of my collaborators. Our artistic quirks and ideas melded together in the container that is the work. It’s the art of idea sharing that helps layer dimension. The piece could not exist without the sound score and the sound score could not exist without the film. I think this net of interrelation is an essential ingredient within the collaborative habitat “ecosystem.” If you create a collaboration that is symbiotic, it allows the work as a whole to reach a new level of complexity.

D: Interdisciplinary collaborations encourage us to reach outside of the artistic “echo chambers” in which we find ourselves working. It’s a challenge, but a challenge we need to deepen and enrich what we make.

Contending with collaborators from outside our respective worlds means finding new conversation around the work, finding new audiences, finding new reasons to create or not to create. We build our fan base this way. The more collaborators there are in the room, the more folks are showing up, supporting, and questioning what’s on the program. To destabilize hierarchies, artists must interact this way. Simply put: good art makes you think, pushes you to ask “WHY?!” and consider the choices made by the creators. Good art requires risk; each viewer and performer and maker has a unique idea of what risk is. Collaboration puts these ideas together in juxtaposition, paradox, harmony.

Over the years you have performed in spaces such as SomoS Arthouse in Berlin, Germany, The Sardine in San Francisco, and with The Indeterminacy Festival in Iowa City: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish direct involvement with the viewers, who urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. As an artist particularly interested in the exploration of the boundaries between artist and audience, how do you consider the issue of

audience reception? And what do you hope to trigger in the spectatorship with your works?

There is so much of myself that I give to the audience. In the same way that my reality bleeds into my process, pieces of who I am become the performance. I do play with different roles and identities, but within all of my works I show up as myself. I think that this truth is a tool to move past mere spectatorship. I’m interested in viewer manipulation and magnetism through instinctual improvisation. I am working with creating a performative habitat for the audience to dive into and explore as a performer/audience without explicitly being told to. I want the audience feel as deeply connected and rooted into the work as the performers.

There is groundwork that needs to be established to give the audience this sense of permission to be a part of the space. It really comes down to performer/audience consent. When I perform, I try to establish trust while beginning to flirt with ambiguity and boundaries. I am interested in reshaping and redefining the fourth wall by triggering the audience’s instinctive response to be involved in the creative experience.

An example: Soft Touch, a work I performed both at the Sardine(sf) and gallery PS8 (sf), in which I experimented with touch and intimacy, with the goal to move the audience through space. I pre-recorded the sound of the audience right before the show and played the score back during the performance. This ambient intrusion created a sense of surveillance and familiarity. As I began to embark on this particular experiment, I realized that I needed time to establish a relationship. So, I made an effort to make eye contact with everyone who was in the space. Sensitive to the audience’s body language, I began to gradually explore touch within a performative space. Soft Touch evolved into a psychological and physical flirtation with the audience. I noticed that the more open and willing I was in my explorations, the more receptive the audience became. Once I drew in the viewer, I tried to elicit a thirst to get up and move around the space. It was an unspoken game: can I get us all to move and be moved?

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Ainsley.

Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers I have an idea of the trajectory my work will take, but only time will tell.

What I find so fascinating about the work that I make is that everything in my life is a part of the research process. The work that I am making now is only research for the work that I am going make in the future. When viewed this way, my works are landmarks that reflect as well as direct my movement through life in all its fullness, this includes the effects felt and witnessed within to social and political climate.

My curiosities draws me to learn from different forms of artistic expression that complement the work that I am making now ex. Film, projection design. These curiosities enhance the environmental experience within the live performance. I’m interested in spectatorship through a series of different lenses and perspectives. I’m working on the curation of symbiotic relationships within performance, while exploring more immersive live performance incorporating the audience as performers. Recently my creative collaborator Jonah Kagan and I have been discussing permanency in dance, and what that means… So that will probably show up somewhere.

I am currently working on a another film, which is in the early editing stages. This film is another collaborative creation with Luke Daenen cinematographer, Jonah Kagan my creative collaborator, and Antonio Modica musician. Exploring different frequencies and waves of connection, we are playing with voyeurism and cohesion as the human body in implanted in nature terrain.

I am currently working on a collaboration with Sculpture artist Dana Albany. I am setting a work in response and conjunction to her 15 foot sculpture Tara Mechani (soon to find a temporary home in San Francisco). I am exploring societal expectation of the female figure as art, decoration, design, and entertainment through the female gaze. I’m working in creating an improvisational score centering around community, empathy, strength, and compassion as a response to the futuristic female. The work is site specific and expected to premiere in San Francisco, Hayes Valley at the beginning of 2019.

This article was constructed, edited, and sourced with help from my creative collaborators Dorothy Armstrong, and Joseph Norman.

Women Cinemakers meets

Tania Cucoreanu Lives and works in Bucharest, Romania

How long? is a dance video experiment meant to position and distribute the body in the 2D video limits. The exercise eliminates certain physical figure joints and thus divides the body in puzzle pieces which are composed according to the real body movement in fantasy physical forms. The vertical and horizontal motion is explored without altering the real dimensions of each body part.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com is a captivating dance short film by Romanian choreographer and experimental video artist Tania Cucoreanu that meant to position and distribute the body in the 2D video limits: exploring and subverting the grammar of the language of human body this unconventional video address the viewers to such heightened and multilayered experience, to create a captivating allegory of human perceptionand our relationship with the concept of body: we are particularly pleased to

introduce our readers to Cucoreanu's multifaceted and stimulating artistic production.

Hello Tania and welcome to : we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence your evolution as a choreographer and an experimental filmmaker?

Moreover what did address you to focus a part of your artistic research on ?

Hello and thank you for inviting me to this conversation. My background revolves around

choreography. In 2008 I graduated from the University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest with a degree in Choreography, at a time when the economic crisis was at its peak, while at the same time, the cultural and the artistic scenes were going through an effervescent stage; back then, people used to call Bucharest the "little Berlin" because there were plenty of artistic groups who became very active, there were lots of independent projects, both spontaneous and experimental, and in addition we had the online medium right at our fingertips, offering a new and useful field to explore. In this context, my partner, Andrei Ionita and I decided to make an online video show about this cultural phenomenon. We named our project Veioza Arte, and it grew while we were learning the video production techniques. For ten years, we got to meet with many extraordinary artists that we interviewed and made documentaries about their work, and recorded lots of events. This whole time, we would very often end up working with them as documentarists, or visual artists for some documentary film projects and theatre and dance performances.

Professionally, we've always been independent. We edited in an experimental way, and we had the freedom to experience new things with each video material we created. Although I haven't been working as a performer for the last ten years, I still got the chance to develop in-house project ideas and video projects which involved dancing.

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers I find video dance as the most appropriate artistic form for me. Today, I see myself as an amateur artist experimenting in an intimate and personal space, ideas directed mostly toward a technical aspect of the body and image/video, or rather toward motion and image, and I rarely share these experiments with the public.

I am fascinated by this post technologic cyber dystopia we are imagining in a plasticized natural environment, altered by the social, climate, political changes we are witnessing now. we For this special edition of have selected , an extremely interesting dance video 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 is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such refined aesthetic, inviting the viewers to such a experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

Since I had all the necessary technical instruments at my disposal, I started with the question in what way could the body shown on the screen be transformed so that it differs from what a performer can do in real life? And then, a performative technique crossed my mind. It

implied the body sensation of filling up the whole space through motion; however in reality, no matter how large and spectacular the body motions are, they still cannot conquer the space or at least try to reach its limits.

How long? is the first exercise I did in which I decided to use my body and a series of simple motions inspired by an animated cartoon made by Roman Tolici under the name "dance", which we have exposed in our work studio. We recorded

these motion series against a black background.

With the help of some black stripes I removed some segments of the body to highlight those motion generating ones (knees, elbows, ankles, and so on).

But the experiment truly started with the video editing process.

I am very passionate about Adobe's After effects, because it gives you plenty of possibilities which add to the experiment, and this is what kept me motivated to develop this project. In brief, I

structured the body into segments which expand and compress in accordance to the way the body moves. The final edit form I chose was to keep the background as it was and the neutral space atmosphere, unknown and undefined, and thus I managed to keep the focus on the body.

Your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to : how do you consider the relationship between the necessity

of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and ? How play in much importance does your process?

Although it may sound radical, I think that dance without improvisation is nothing but gymnastics.

I've studied ballet for 8 intensive years and during that period, I had to restrict my freedom to move, although I was convinced that I could still express myself due to my flexibility and physical

endurance/strength. But this mechanization of the moves enforces a frustrating rigidity to the body. I remember when I left ballet for contemporary dance and I had to practically teach my body to free itself from all the information it assimilated mechanically, and I had to re-learn how to move freely and relax my body, and especially to remember the ways a free, civil body operates. I am not an active performer anymore, but every time I use my body in various project ideas, I allow myself to be completely free in my moves, I improvise according to a form or a style.

Nonetheless, I no longer have performative claims from my body and this makes me feel quite comfortable.

We have appreciated the way

explores

: featuring essential and well-orchestrated choreography, involves the audience in a voyeuristic and heightened visual experience, urging them to challenge their perceptual categories to create personal narratives: what are you hoping will trigger in the spectatorship? In particular, how important is for you to address the viewer's imagination in order to elaborate personal associations?

Even though, in our times, it seems pretty hard to surprise the contemporary spectator who is so familiar with 3D effects, with perspectives impossible

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

to experiment in real life, colors and extraordinary shapes just by going to IMAX on weekend, and still, I think that the digital environment is continuously expanding as it contains an infinite number of parallel universes, equally fertile in aesthetics and able to convey to the viewer something else besides just the "special effects". Imagination develops along with science and technology, feeding from the increasing volume of information which is more accessible now than ever.

Gerhard Richter’s idea completely resonates with me My creative process involves the whole body, even though it does that with the help of technical and technological extensions (tools).

I don't think I know any work of art made by a human being which does not involve the human body. Each gesture generates an impact over the creation process and eventually over the final work.

How long? explores the relationship between the movement of the body from reality into a fantastic form of minimal aesthetics, in a video concentrated into one minute because I know the spectator can assimilate and understand without any aesthetic or stylistic tricks. It was obvious that I wasn't going to waste the viewer's time, especially since it was an exercise about the temporal and structural fragility of the body.

Even the post production process may be compared with the performance of playing an instrument, except that it is very diluted/stretched in time. You must always be in control of your body and the tools you work with, like a camera in my case, and the computer with editing software. Any wrong move may cause a dissonance, a physical injury, or maybe a new discovery, an innovation, a new artistic language.

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 ideas you aim to communicate and of creating your artworks?

Sound plays a relevant role in your work and we have appreciated the way the sound tapestry provides the footage of with such an ethereal and a bit unsettling atmosphere: as an artist particularly concerned in , how would you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see ?

Motion implies vibration and sound; moving without music accompaniment also produces sound. I love music; for me, it is the most abstract and magical artistic form. I chose to work with Nava Spatiala for this project, a noise band from Romania, initiated by Miron Ghiu and Claudiu Chihaescu. I like their sound/music and I think they've done an interesting mix with my video material.

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 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?

I think the online environment has a positive effect on consumption, including the consumption of art. It is an extraordinary environment to exhibit and display.

Even though Google might think it knows us well enough to categorize us in various niches, it takes more than the simple existence of this environment to reach those people interested in the same artistic processes as you are. Moreover, for the art consumer, it is still rather hard, given the huge volume of information, to find those products that really interest him. That's why I strongly believe that we need

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

A still from

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Women Cinemakers dedicated and specialized platforms, capable to make a certain selection and classification. This is what I had in mind from the start, with veiozaarte.ro team - to present avant-garde artists and projects, from Romania and other countries as well, to a public with a great interest for alternative art and culture.

I have high hopes regarding artists' visibility in the online environment, there are lots of platforms already helping them make their work public/known, promote and generate income, crowdfunding their projects; and for us, the video content producers, the online medium is vital.

We have really appreciated the orignality of your artistic research and 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 ', 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 field? future of women in this I am very excited to be contemporaneous with this feminist movement. I know it is a process of long duration and it will be hard to win all the rights, and that is why it is important for women to show solidarity

and always be aware of those whose rights had been broken, and I'm referring to the artists from Orient, Africa, from conflict zones and from all the places in the world where women's rights are being broken.

As for me, as a woman in this field, I might say I was lucky, even though I know what sex-based discrimination is/feels like, but most of the people I work with have high human qualities and they always encouraged/helped me when I needed it. In the near future I hope that all human beings, regardless of their sex, race, religion or social class, will benefit from all the rights and responsibilities a democratic and free social and political structure implies.

Meanwhile: respect women! respect gay people! respect children! & respect nature!

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Tania. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects?

How do you see your work evolving?

Thank you for your interest and for your time. I will develop How Long? I don’t know for how long but I will definitely join some high profile festivals and show up online with new ideas, + I look forward to working in VR! An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers meets

Natasha Le Sourd My work consists of sculptures, drawings, paintings, installations, and videos. Using the aesthetic language of childhood, the reconstruction of ready-made toys, the nude, landscape, and ideas of identity and intimacy, the work often asks to be interacted with, whether it is to be hugged, have it’s hair teased, or to be laid with. I am asking viewers to think about the interaction with the artwork and the relationship that you have with the actual object that it refers to. These reflections bring us back to a primal loneliness and, ultimately, self-awareness. Social media informs the work, specifically Instagram, and supplies it with a library of matter. The pieces, in consummation, reveal questions like; what is real? What is myth? And what is a/the legitimate perception?

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

Hello Natasha and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training you hold a BFA of Fine Arts, that you received from Parsons New School: how did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural background direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

It’s interesting to me that you call it a formal training, I think Parsons was quite the contrary, but maybe I feel this way because I am NOT the most traditional learner.

Having been educated in the French system even through High School in America, where I attended a French Lycée, it linked well to the trajectory of my education; to think bigger than what you see, to create your own opinions and encourage the importance of research, all these things were critical.

Parsons in particular taught me and allowed me to think beyond the reality of an object, how to see what

was in front of you without forgetting the multiple branches one object or thought can belong to or evoke. Parsons / The New School is a progressive school that teaches you how to think very much in the now.

The presence in the now is what makes the future.

Which is why I mostly associate myself to Contemporary methods, not attached to the traditional techniques of art making but not ignorant of them either. I am dissociated to the value of materials, unless it is important to the final idea of a work.

The ability to look beyond tradition and technique while still being able to recall them or refer to them, all this knowledge became the pillars of my practice, I am an artist of the now.

You are an eclectic artist and your versatile practice reveals the ability of crossing from a media to another: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit https://www.natashalesourd.xyz 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?

I start most project with an idea, inspired by the ready made or by the sudden desire to do draw or use my hands. I think all projects call for their own mediums, they are all different.

Sometime one inspired the other one or sometime I do not feel like working with a certain material, so I decide to move on and look for something else to be inspired by. For example, with a interest in toys, I have made Maze II, it is a

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers project referencing the bead maze toy, which is often found in the pediatric doctor’s office. I totally fell in love with the object itself, I found it so beautiful and entertaining while being a very intricate toy for toddlers as well as for adults. I decided to replicate in larger format, one was placed on to the wall, three metal rods of three different colors, intertwined with each other, and a second one with eight metal rods, coming from the wall to the floor (10 ft by 8ft by 5ft high) all different colors. Since my sculpture often replicate the ready made, its choice of materials is already determined by the object.

For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Eve running, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the theme of freedom of womanhood is the way it addresses the viewers to such unconventional and multilayered experience.While walking our readers through the genesis of Eve running, could you tell us how did you develop the initial idea ?

Eve is a series of work made of one tapestry, five photographs, three videos and ten ‘live’ sculptures.

Enlightened by my first project on Adam and Eve, I came to the thought that this biblical blame on Eve is unthinkable and unfair since Humanity is based in the knowledge that comes from experience. We remained primal while being aware of others and our own self.

I slowly became interested in the reincarnation of Eve in myself. Being a model since very young, posing is something

that comes naturally to me, I always associated myself to greek figures to 14th century paintings because of my body type : luscious curves, wide hips, small waist and small bust. I found a lot of pleasure in mimicking their bodies and presences. To me, Eve would come out as a ghost in the first photographs I took of myself.

Eve running was the first live action attempt of reenacting her, I always posed as her but never took the action of moving like her. It only became what it is now after the fact of the making. It was impulsive and stupid since I became very sick because of it, it was a cold and wet day

though the movie may not seem so, but prideful for doing it.

Furthermore, I had just watch The Idiots from Lars Von trier, who based the whole film on people stripping away their self consciousness, letting their bodies move, think and do without intentions. To me, this movie was very inspirational because of the complexity of the idea, I had never seen, read, or heard this take on philosophy, on happiness and on freedom. I was blown away by his breaking of rules in the way it was made, since Cinema can be so traditional and repetitive in many ways. I was

shocked by the level of emotion and humanity he was able to convey through a truly alternative format. A lot was boiling in my head while thinking of Eve and creating more depth out of her. My perception of Film, Video and Performance was all changing at the same time, and all the while I was beginning to create a language that spoke of the deeply symbolic through my own experience.

Eve running has drawn heavily from the specifics of the natural environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful resonance between space and movement: how did

you select the locations and how did they affect your performance?

It was September in Connecticut, I was walking in the forest with my best friend Rose to the waterfall Nonnewaug falls.

Being an lifelong urbanite makes my heart very susceptible to the siren song of countrysides and empty spaces.

It just had rained heavily, it was damp, early Fall. That past Summer, I was obsessively videographing all the nature

Women Cinemakers that was on my way. With the same idea I was filming my whole natural surrounding. Beforehand my friend mentioned that it was a Native American land, with this in mind I could only think of the power of the space and how sacred and ancient this space must be. Along the way there were many empty lands like the one on the video, and every time I saw it, I’d say “ I just want to be naked and run around !”. Like in meditation, my spirit and my mind were open to the space around me, in the same way the spirit of Eve is. Moreover, I also had in mind of the symbol of water in certain religions, as the space of rebirth. The whole promenade was full of symbolism and power. While visiting the fall I had finally decided to strip away from my clothes and start my nude parade in two locations. One around the trees and Eve running in the empty land. Handed my camera to Rose, I let myself be, for as long as I could, naked and unafraid !

Eve running is centered on the figure of Eve, who represents the freedom of womanhood, she is free of all judgements and responsibilities. We like that way it invites the viewers to question the way women’s identity is constructed through the perception of others, in our globalized still patriarchal and male-oriented age. Not to mention that these days almost everything, from Maurizio Cattelan's 'The Ninth Hour' to Marta Minujín's 'Reading the News', could be considered political: do you think that Eve running could be considered political, in a certain sense? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value?

In our time the body IS political, it is charged with political discussions. From your skin color, to body modifications to your genitals, there will always be someone that will challenge your identity in your close and distant social group.

Particularly here, the initial intention isn't to be a political piece…but it cannot escape the political realm in honest, nor should it. The liberation of women is the separation and the acknowledgement of the matriarchy. In Eve running, there are certain moments where the features of the body become transparent, you can only notice a white body running, it starts glowing. The video has moments that remove in some way my gender, it relieves it from my conscious, stripping away the thing that makes us women, the body. As much as I am women, I am a being as well which is more where the focus is put on. The spectatorship of my womanhood is not necessarily something special in the sense that all women are the spectator of themselves. The research of my female body is only special from its present representation.

We have highly appreciated the way Eve running features such captivating inquiry into the grammar of human body to create a kind of involvement with the audience 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 particular, German visual artist Gerhard Richter remarked once that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature

Women Cinemakers

Artists across all mediums have a sensibility that is connected to the exterior world. We are able to look and act upon what we see like you mentioned in Richter’s quote. You cannot avoid the similarities that we have as being a physical body to an artwork. In sculpture especially, we often uses active verbs to describe it as if they were comparable to a body, for example “It stands, it grows, it moves, it weighs, etc.” all these active verbs, very human verbs. We are interpreters of semiotics between the real and the mind. Since, Eve is about being, therefore I act, and so acknowledges that I cannot escape the semiotics of my body.

Yes, I have realized the power of association when I was working on a piece called I Gotchu (2016), a body pillow of my naked self that offers physical contact like an embrace or a hug. It refers to hentai and video game culture in Japan, people falling in love with fictional or virtual characters and choosing to surround themselves with printed out bodies on pillows for companionship.

This piece was made for others people use, but it became more about me than them. From that day, I realized how powerful and revealing this was, and decided to focus on this idea. I understood that the interaction with the artwork will help reveal something about themselves since we are made up of different cultures, trauma, experiences, identities, etc. While reading about the ‘Object relations theory” which is “the process of developing a psyche in relation to others in the environment during childhood” and theories from Donald Winnicott, it brought me to childhood and toys.

Which was the next step of my practice, a series called “Lost @ Play”.

An interesting aspect of your 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 spectatorship. 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 think being understood in general is probably the hardest thing to achieve especially when we are talking about works that talk about individual Identity.

Undeniably, my work is about me but it always touches upon the grander questioning of our existence. I am not necessarily trying to be validated by others, rather I aim more to communicate a feeling, an experience, a trait. I look for your own interpretation in the work, it’s more exciting and interesting even if it is the opposite of my intentions, the interpretation reveals more about you at that moment.

of the issues that you explore and the physical act of creating your artworks?

Like Descartes “ I think, therefore I am”, our mind is connected to our physical body, inseparable. My work is the extension of my body, I act in what I think is right whether it is about my politics, my fashion style, my work, my body, etc.

To emphasize the ubiquitous bond between everyday life's experience and creative process British visual artist Chris Ofili once remarked that "creativity's to do with improvisation  what's happening around you". How does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process?

My current day job is being an art teacher, I get really inspired by children, I find their works so innocent and at the same time so full of ideas. I am the kind of person that always think too much about something, and forget to have fun with my work. My kids reminds me to let loose and not think too much. My partner is a gardener, and our garden has brought many beautiful reminders of curves, colors and assemblage. Or even just seeing someone using a material in a certain and different way. I am tradionnationaly trained in photography, and my eyes often goes there first but there is really no end to the daily inspirations. It can be so small and so big all at once. All these little things maintain the inner dialogue of the work and the creative thought.

We have appreciated the way you explore the expressive potential of found materials to subvert the narrative process in order to create a completely new one: German art critic and historian Michael Fried once stated that 'materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more.'

What are the the properties that you are searching for in the materials that you include in your works?

I could only agree and disagree, materials do represent, signify or allude to something to me. Materials are associated to the ready-made unless it is bare or on it’s own.

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers

A still from

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Women Cinemakers All works of mine specifically refer to the ready made object or the idea, It can be very literal in that way. In the materials that I am working right now, I am looking for colors, childhood reference, toys, furnitures, textures and really trying to experiment with process. How can I transform a material to something else or how do I delude the primary function of the material.

We have appreciated the originality of your artistic research and 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 experience as being a female artist as of now is that when I talk with strangers without my artwork, I had problem being heard, or taken seriously.

My last experience working at an emerging contemporary gallery in New York was that I was mostly there for the eye candy for the public, there is a lot of talking and very little actions, which can be very frustrating. Being a world dominated by men, people interested in me will come with the intention of conquest first and less of genuine interests. As much as we are progressing, we are still at the level of infant steps, women have to work twice as hard just to be heard today. The Art world is an unregulated business which means there is no rules or protections on anything.

The weirdest part of it all, is that I graduated with 33 women out of 36 students, more and more women are here and still

struggling. Though what I noticed is that more women are getting attention they deserve, all my favorite artists of right now are women and not because they are just women but because they are genuinely brilliant in their art making. Social progress is really slow, but surely moving, Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Natasha. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I am currently applying for a Master in Sculpture in Philadelphia. I am focusing on making my work, and continuing to push. I am also teaching art for outreach communities, which really opened my eyes to the necessity of these kind of activities. I can’t imagine my life without making art and I am really happy to facilitate an expressive space for kids at a young age. I found myself to be so inspired by kids work.

I am currently working on large and small sculptures, which can become furniture, playgrounds,etc. While also, working on this large installation with fabrics. A lot is in process and I can only be so excited about new opportunities coming my way!

Thank you for giving me a chance to speak about my work, being recognized by an organization like yours is such a pure, positive experience.

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

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Women Cinemakers

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and

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Women Cinemakers meets

Wesley Fawcett Creigh Lives and works in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

“Prototype” is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration with local educators and youth groups commissioned by MOCA Tucson (AZ) in conjunction with its fall '17 exhibit, Nothing to Declare: Transnational Narratives. The video was created in collaboration with the museum’s weekly after school program of 8-11 year olds, a Pima Community College Border Cultures class, and a Tucson High School Art Appreciation class. The youth and student participants contributed all the visual, audio, and textual elements to this project which I then edited together. This work is an experiment in collaboration across age groups that tackles the complex topics of border culture and politics sourcing from experiences both real and imagined.

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

Hello Wesley and welcome to : we would invite our readers to visit in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would like to start this interview with a

couple of questions about your background.

You have a solid formal training and you hold a Bachelor’s Degree at Prescott College in the self-designed major of Public Art with an Emphasis on Social Impact: how did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? And how does your cultural substratum due to your experience as a teacher at the Pima Community College direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

Women Cinemakers

I got my Bachelor’s through an experimental degree program where I took on mentors from the Tucson community for my professors. Together, these mentors and I designed custom courses based on my interests which at that time were art, history of social movements, and psychology. The end result was this degree track, which I named myself, Public Art with an Emphasis on Social Impact. This was a bit before the terms community engagement and social practice were in common usage, but I’d say that was what I was trying to get at. This somewhat unorthodox degree program gave me a phenomenal blueprint for which to live out the rest of my creative life, which was simply: whatever you want to learn, find someone who can teach you and then just ask. Much of the time people are happy to teach you what they know and so this is still my approach to learning, I learn best from watching and engaging with others. For my senior thesis project I created a series of life-size cut outs that depicted events of police and border patrol brutality. I set up these diorama-like installations all over the City of Tucson one night only to have them all be confiscated by the police in the morning. However, I had sent out an anonymous press release along with photos I had taken of these installations and sent them to every news outlet I could get a contact for and it got picked up internationally. The really terrific thing about my degree program was that I was not

Women Cinemakers entangled with a campus environment and so that pushed me to engage with a larger community very early on. My degree-work had no built in audience so I gravitated towards the public realm using the city as a backdrop and traditional media as my promotion.

One of the most exciting evolutions throughout my adult life was the transition from student to teacher. I love empowering others with techniques, technical knowledge, and confidence to try new things. I have taught ages from preschool to college and enjoyed them all but it’s at the Community College where I felt I had the most impact, teaching scenic design and building techniques for the theater department. Every semester I witnessed these small transformations in many of my students, some of whom had never even used a drill before, learning how to build a piece of scenery from the ground up. For me, creating a finished product from a pile of raw material is thrilling and gives me such a boost of confidence, it makes me excited to pass this knowledge on to others, especially young women, because it is maddening how women are still being underestimated and overlooked in so many trades.

But I also stressed the importance of breaking out of the academic bubble as soon as possible, not to ditch out on school completely, but to always keep their eyes open for opportunities outside of the institution. I

believe it makes the transition so much easier for young students when they’ve already become involved with their larger communities to get their degrees and then find fulfilling work.

For this special edition of we have selected

, a captivating

walk our readers through , that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at : would you

of

? How did you develop the initial idea?

Women Cinemakers The initial concept for Prototype came from an impulse I had to create an animated video using other people’s artwork. That was my starting point. I had just completed one of my first animation projects called “Of Rocks and Bullets”, which examined a specific incident of Border Patrol violence, and I was really excited about animation as an art form and a method of storytelling.

Due to my design and fabrication background in theater, I was very comfortable with collaboration, but I was drawn towards this idea of having very little control at the beginning of the collaboration i.e the artwork that was being produced, but total control over the way those wildcard elements got stitched together into the final product.

It was this great balance of being given all of these parameters initially but having total freedom within them.

My “Of Rocks and Bullets” installation was going to be exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art as part of a group show called “Nothing to Declare: Transnational Narratives” and for this exhibit an artist named Paul Turounet was constructing a life-size replica of the US/Mexico border wall through the middle of the museum. I approached the education director at the museum with my idea for doing an animation project using youth artwork and having it be about their perceptions of borders as a way for them to

Women Cinemakers be more in conversation with the upcoming exhibition. So the museum commissioned the piece and allowed me to run this experiment through their weekly after-school program of 8-11 year olds. I spent 10 weeks working with those youth discussing borders and exploring visual ways of representing their ideas.

As you have remarked in your artist's statement, is

. Could you tell us something about of this experience? Moreover, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value?

The education director at MOCA had a major contribution to this project by suggesting I work with a high school and college class as well. Soon the project was broken up into three groups, with the youngest being responsible for all of the artwork, the high school class offering the audio component, and the college students contributing the written responses. I went into each classroom that was participating and introduced my work and then the concept behind this project. We gave the college students a series of prompts to which they had to respond with one word. Using a word cloud generator, students would submit their answers, the more a single word was

Women Cinemakers submitted the larger that word became. In Prototype you see their responses to the prompt, “In a word, describe the border wall itself”, on a continuous loop in the back ground. The high school class I worked with was my friend’s Art Appreciation class at Tucson High School, she conducted interviews with each of the students in that class. What is so striking to me about Prototype is how much direct experience this one high school classroom has with international borders, and some of them are intertwined with them in especially traumatic ways. I think it is important for our society to understand just how many lives are being affected by our militarized approach to border security. So many lives hang in the balance of these policies, particularly young lives are being shaped dramatically by the way this situation is being handled. I think this video does a really good job of highlighting that. As for the youngest participants, they blew me away by their creations.

Unlike the high school students, many of the 8-11 year olds didn’t claim to have many personal experiences visiting Mexico or seeing the border wall, that’s why I refer to a lot of their representations as ‘imagined’ perceptions of borders. Half-way through our workshop series, Turounet’s border wall installation was erected in the museum. After this went up and the youth were able to engage with it, they all of a sudden had a lot of really specific questions about borders and immigration.

That life-size visual reference created a shift, all of

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Women Cinemakers sudden they were responding to this visual representation as opposed to relying on their imaginations to relate to the concept.

When I approach any of my creative projects, I am coming to them as a woman with my whole bank of socialization, experiences, and tendencies. That’s my point of view so I think there might be things I am more interested in or concerned about when exploring a subject and I am always looking at issues from a woman’s standpoint. Of course, my perspective is still uniquely its own and there is a wide range of women’s perspectives, but I do feel that is always something I am bringing into every project I do although I am not sure how it affects my actual processes.

We have highly appreciated the way creates capable of walking the viewers to the interstitial point where reality and imagination find a consistent pointsof convergence: how do you consider the relationship between the real and the imagined? In particular, are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate ?

Humans have a natural tendency to fear the unknown and that is really taken advantage of in our political systems, media, etc. People are terrified of what is not familiar and that is at the heart of the immigration

Women Cinemakers debate. A lot of ugly assumptions are made about the populations that do not look like us, don’t speak the same languages, eat different foods. As far as Prototype was concerned, it was an unintended benefit to have the artwork come from the younger participants in the project, for the most part their imaginations haven’t been diluted with politics and stereotypes. There was one child, however, when asked to draw two pictures one depicting each side of the border, made a drawing of the Mexico side that featured a group of Mexican citizens flipping off an image of Donald Trump, so some young people are picking up on more than others. For the most part however, when we started engaging them on this topic, their imaginations would run wild and they would come up with some pretty dystopian imagery. By high school and college it seems like those imaginings give way to actual experiences and feelings about the border, and so many of them are living lives that are deeply impacted by the border and those that aren’t are heavily influenced by the political cultures of their families and communities. But for the younger ones, these concepts are still science fiction. The freaky thing is how closely their fantasies are mirroring real life.

You work has often focused on sharing personal and community narratives as a means of promoting social justice for individuals and groups. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once remarked that "

Women Cinemakers

": as an art researcher involved in numerous social practice projects, what could be in our unstable, in your opinion everchanging contemporary age? In particular, does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment?

In a lot of ways I see myself as a documentarian more than anything else. I think it is a social responsibility for some of us to maintain a record of social and political discourse in our communities. That is oftentimes how I view my work, as a public record. In reference to that Orozco quote I would say that I am more comfortable documenting social movement than dictating it and this is may be shaped by where I come from. I believe in the importance of being a good ally, especially living in the US, which has and will continue to wreak havoc across the globe. There is so much I don’t stand for that we are doing on our own soil as well as others’ and I am drawn to grapple with these injustices in my work by putting other peoples’ stories forward and trying to amplify them.

We have been impressed with your stunning approach to documentary, as well as your sapient use of editing techniques, that allow you to captures hidden emotional reactions with sharp eye: what

Women Cinemakers was the most challenging thing about making this film and what did you learn from this experience?

The concept of borders and immigration is so universally relatable, even to young children, that the topic alone really set up this project for success.

There is so much symbolism tied up in these topics that everyone had something to contribute that was ultimately useful in the final edit. When I first sat down to edit all of the high school interviews I realized that the term they all used to describe borders was “separation”, which was also the most common response among the college students. I don’t know if that would have been the case if I had done this project in a different part of the country. I think this speaks to the fact that growing up near the US/Mexico border cultivates this inherent sense of separation and that is a really interesting thing to examine more closely. So I don’t think it was pure coincidence that I was given such a perfect point of culmination for the film in this word, “separation”, but it was a pleasant surprise. When I stumbled upon that common thread it worked out a lot of questions I had about how to drive the video forward and everything the younger kids drew seemed to fall right into place with that trajectory.

Women Cinemakers All of that being said, I can easily envision a scenario where all the pieces don’t fit together as well and it is more of a challenge to create something that flows and feels cohesive. I have since used this method again with a community of folks with chronic mental illness who are all members of a social club in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. We created an animated video using their audio statements and drawings to explore the concepts of home and belonging. The final work is called “Model Home” and although I like how it turned out, it lacks the depth that came from having three different groups of varying ages tackle each element of the video separately. There’s an element of serendipity in it that is really exciting to me.

Your work as an artist combines experimentation to analytic approach: what did direct you to combine animation and multi-media installation in your practice?

I have loved animation my whole life and I think it fit in seamlessly with my artistic practice because I have always been interested in breaking things down into smaller parts. Whether we are talking about a visual image or a social issue. I like pulling things apart and breaking them down into simpler more digestible elements. So the process of animation really resonates with me, you literally break down every moment into frames, 24 per second.

Another upshot to animation is that it can exist in all kinds of space. I have created animations for large-scale

Women Cinemakers projection for theater productions and also have shown my work on small monitors in private viewing booths so you can have more of an intimate experience with the content. Its adaptability really attracts me and with my background in theatrical design I love to think spatially so the two disciplines feel like a natural pairing to me.

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 the 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?

My work is very process-heavy. I like to work with community groups towards creating final products all the while considering the process as important as the outcome. A lot of the time, who I consider as my “audience” I also consider as my collaborators. I think the best way to pull someone into your art is to bring them in while you are creating it. I know that all of the young people who

contributed to the Prototype video felt deeply connected to the work in the way that they don’t often feel with art. I believe that having experiences like that can be very powerful. So I think of it more as making art the right people at the right place and time. If my work reverberates beyond the moment it is being made in collaboration, then I consider that all a bonus.

As far as the online techno sphere is concerned, as of now I don’t have a smart phone, I don’t do any social media and I am trying to hold off as long as I can from changing any of that (I do have a website). I am trying to stay in the moment as much as possible, which is already a huge challenge to me without this extra technology in my life. I see how much potential for reach there is with social media and I see a lot of artists who are harnessing that potential in really inspiring ways. I am just not passionate enough about it to go there myself yet. With so many new options comes a lot more choices, and I guess I’ve found that instead of getting bogged down with so many options I would take a few off the table for myself and I think that’s worked well for me. Just as in my artistic process I like having very clear parameters, this tendency permeates throughout the other aspects of my life.

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 contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing ', however in the last something ' 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?

The fact that technology for animation and filmmaking is becoming increasingly accessible I think more and more women will pursue paths in media arts disciplines. On top of that, we can teach ourselves nearly anything using the internet, and so women are having to rely a lot less on male gatekeepers of knowledge and technology.

The fact that I can create a 5-minute animation entirely on my own in a month is a mind-blowing development when you consider how cumbersome the animation process used to be. It is really exciting where things are going, scary too because everything seems to be moving so fast it can feel hard to maintain. It has been a challenge to stay grounded in my practice and follow my interests while being inspired by others but not putting pressure on myself to “keep up� with any particular pace. I only see this challenge

intensifying as we rocket into the future but I am glad to be learning the coping mechanisms for it now. Society is doing a better job at empowering women, paying them equally, etc. but there is still a lot of progress to be made. In the future, I see myself doing more projects involving girls and young women to help keep this momentum going.

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

My latest project is another animation-based installation about bi-national love relationships.

It’s called Love in the Time of Migra, if you are in a bi-national relationship with someone and would like to share about it, please contact me through my website: www.wesleyfawcettcreigh.com. In addition to that project, I am excited about exploring projection mapping with my animation work and building specific sets and sculptural elements to interact with video. Thanks so much for taking the time to get to know about me and my work.

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