Deeply, Madly video installation - Burdened by an irrational fear of being pushed onto the metro tracks, a woman muses on what it is to fall. To fall flat, but also to fall heavily in love, deep into sleep, or into a holiday pool that time on a faraway Greek Island at 2am. Water acts as an important element. Waves keep crashing, summoning Deeply, Madly as an obsession with moments of being mid-motion—bodies, emotions and time that all succumb to gravitational forces—from the lovesick, to the slapstick, to the macabre.
Gestures of Matter (2020) HD video, 3’20 excerpt (original 12’30) - Gestures of Matter deals with a range of characters who embody different voices to reflect on political and economic excesses. One can watch the oscillation between extremes - of gluttonous gorging and enforced fasting, of subservient service with a smile, of scathing internet reviews, all-you-can-eat challenges and kinetic kebabs that form themselves into DNA helixes. The work is an absurd and layered reflection on terms such as "you are what you eat" - thinking more about the transactions that are present in a capitalist economy, such as consumption, desire and ethical responsibility.
Sunday (2020) HD video, 3’40 excerpt (original 16’05) - - Sunday is a short fictional film that thinks about the medium of radio and how it was formerly used in the twentieth century as a technique to encourage productive labor in factories. The radio and beat of the music helped control the workforce on the assembly line, creating a constant upbeat-tempo to produce. Using this notion of the radio as a controlling, motivating and affective soundtrack for efficiency, the work experiments with how radio could be reimagined under certain contemporary conditions. The involves the figure of the radio agony aunt, a disembodied voice that offers anonymous callers advice. A lady, known as Sandra, calls up talking about how numbers, rhythmic machines and voices are slowly taking over her fatigued body and obsessive mind, working much like the beat of an infectious song. Commissioned in the frame of Quote — Unquote: Video Station. With additional support from HISK, Belgium and Generator Projects, UK.
Blood Sisters (2020), 4K video, 1’00 excerpt (original 11’00) - Blood Sisters is a collaborative video work made by the artists Josefin Arnell and Helen Anna Flanagan. The student rich location of Groningen was used as a site to research into the old student fraternities present within the city. The artists were particularly drawn to the traditional hazing rituals, using them as a loose starting point to create a fictional initiation ceremony for four older females. Hazing rituals often involve forcing new members into humiliating acts and is considered to help strengthen group cohesion and identity. The work took an interest in these rituals and a number of corresponding topics, including the abject physicality of a woman's body, conformity, social pressure, age and agency. As such, the work playfully explores power, humiliation and hierarchies in relation to fear in public space, focusing on shame as a way to control and manipulate behavior. Produced with Stichting SIGN (with the additional support of Research Group Image in Context Hanze UAS Groningen & DesignArbeid, Amsterdam)
Gestures of Anatomy (2019), HD video, 2’10 excerpt (original 14’00) - Gestures of Anatomy uses the location of the launderette to focus on cyclical systems and feedback loops - looking in more depth at the characters who make up a 'social fabric'. It involves five different characters who explore in varying degree the systems that harness them. A female sex worker talks privately about her body, her sweat and desire; a man reflects on his need for breathable, clean materials whilst morphing into an advertisement sales man; a homeless male on the phone communicates his disdain at others judgment and reads about concepts of pollution and purity on his phone; and two girls communicate carelessly about their repetitive hunger, the synchronization of their periods, and sisterhood. Supported as a result of winning the Feminist Art Prize 2019, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, Belgium.
Gestures of Collapse (2019), HD video, 3’15 excerpt (original 12’00) - Gestures of Collapse is a short film inspired by a news story on an alleged poisoning involving a number of high schools in Belgium in the 1990s. After an investigation, the epidemic was recognized as a large case of mass sociogenic illness (MSI): 'a constellation of symptoms of an organic disease, without identifiable cause, which occurs between two or more people who share beliefs related to those symptoms.' The work Gestures of Collapse uses the television news format to reveal the ways in which contagion, rumors, beliefs, emotions, and actions spread. The work reflects on human action, the mimetic unconscious and the ways in which behaviors are predicted, influenced, reproduced and manipulated.
Swamps & Ponds (2018), HD video, 3’00 excerpt (original 18’00) - The film is loosely based on the speculative origins of a community of peasants known as the Toxicophagi. The Toxicophagi built up resistance to the poison arsenic, by regularly consuming it. This poison was used as a symbolic starting point to explore the power of invisible substances or structures and the tolerance of an overlooked collective. By repurposing this compound, the film explores the implications substances and 'invisible' toxic forces have on an environment and those who inhabit it, looking further at hierarchies, power, subcultures and intoxication. Kindly supported by CBK Rotterdam and Styria-Artist-in-Residence-Stipendien.
Friday (2016), HD video, 2’40 excerpt (original 18’00) - The work Friday considers the limitations of language to share lived experiences with others. To communicate and connect with one another, beyond language, we use alternative systems: one of these is the construction of shared experiences through games. In Friday, the setting of a nightclub provides the stage for two actresses to merge speech and other vocalizations with gestures and moves connected to activities of play, following a partly scripted, partly improvised, scenario.
The Dynamists (2016), HD video, 3,00 excerpt (original 11,00) - The Dynamists is a video involving Angelo Perrotti, a Belgium musician and poet from the eighties, and twelve local teenagers. Inspired by Perrotti's vocals in the underground band The System, the video emphasizes the broken voice, using disruption as a reoccurring motif. The broken voice refers to transitions between different vocal registers, a phase associated mainly with puberty and adolescence. In this video language breaks down, multiple voices rupture or shift in tone, and various frequencies disrupt the sequencing of images. Alluding to the coming-of-age genre, with its 'rites of passage', the video attempts to capture the transitional instability of adolescence and proposes disruption and conflict as an essential part to growth.
