Susanna Fasciolo

documentair - fotografie - schrijven - community - experimenteel

Born and raised in Italy, I lived, worked and studied in London and Rotterdam. I make films to talk about people, places and stories I have a connection with. I make photographs, using both digital and different forms of analog. I use the still image to invoke a story and as a starting point for visual and material experimentation. In my work I combine initial intuitions, instinct and needs with conscious and critical research.


Courgette Flowers (2021) - Courgette Flowers (2021) is part of a larger research project about women’s labour in contemporary Italy, 'The most essential work', which started at the end of 2019. In the video we hear and read four voices telling bits of their stories: these are workers, women, sometimes mothers, and often constant carers inside and outside the domestic walls. They are often underpaid and underappreciated, and yet they do that kind of work we could not live without. The first step were the phone interviews, initially collected as primary research and not as an element that would feed into a final video piece. Then, while engaging with academic and critical research, I started experimenting on how to depict domestic and emotional work. Later on, while staying in a locked-down Italy, I found myself contemplating the only outside view I had: laundry peacefully hanging from neighbours' balconies. Courgette Flowers is the sum of personal stories, countless rewrites, and trying to adapt to the circumstances.
The most essential work (2020) - Research project about domestic work and women's role on the workplace in contemporary Italian society.
Transparent camera (2018) - My first prototype of transparent camera and the first test made with black and white film.
Block Symphony (2017) – Short moving image piece - Block Symphony is a collection of images and sounds recorded in a Council estate in South London where I lived for two years, showing how the presence of residents is felt and yet they are not seen. Put together in the form of a very short video, it develops in a piece that does not celebrate its content but it documents and observes it from the point of view of the filmmaker that is part of the subject and yet lacks feeling of belonging and so moves around the space collecting content whilst also questioning it. Different images are put side by side using the split screen technique, and all the soundtracks play at the same time.
Kensington Stories (2018) – Short documentary - Kensington Stories is the final product of a four months long project. It tells the stories of some residents of North Kensington, a neighbourhood in the heart of Kensington and Chelsea (one of the wealthiest boroughs of the United Kingdom). The residents’ stories are linked to the stories of some buildings of the area that are of historical or architectural relevance. Behind the conversations about community, history and architecture runs the recent ghost of the Grenfell Tower fire, which affected in different ways the whole of London, but particularly everyone that lives in social housing. A grassroots charity, SPID Theatre Company, started this project with engaging a group of teenagers in running oral interviews with local residents and conducting research on the buildings of the area. I then ran filmmaking workshops with the group, aiming at making this documentary. The oral interviews and the initial research were used as a basis for the documentary’s script. The charity wanted to involve local teenagers in something interesting and educational. This documentary is the sum of our opinions, backgrounds and need to take part in the conversation that was and still is happening in London about gentrification and class.
Two weeks landscape (2019) - This photograph is part of a series made with pinhole cameras I made out of film canisters and boxes. Here I used photographic paper and placed the camera so that it would face a building site and record its changes over a period of two weeks.
Polaroid destruction (2019) - A series of self-portraits made with Polaroid and then 'destroyed' by separating the different layers and by intervening on the chemical composition of the instant photographs.
Anna (2019) – Short film - Made in occasion of the Eye on Art Research Labs and screened at the Eyefilmmuseum. A blending of family oral history, fictional methods and improvisation.
frown (2018) – Photobook in collaboration with Andreas Drosdz - A photobook where grids with wind beaten faces are paired up with full-page photographs. The cover suggests the playful spirit in which this book was created. 'frawn' also has an element of interaction and surprise. Some photos (those that reveal most information about the time and place) are placed in folded pages. Such pages are glue binded with the others and perforated on the side of the fold. The reader has to open the perforated side with a knife or a ruler. The foreword is also in one of the hidden pages.