video feature
Francesca Fini
Videoartist of the Month July 2020
Francesca Fini
When Francesca Fini submitted in 2010 for the 1st time, it was for “self~imaging – artist portraying themselves in film & video”, it wasn’t clear yet, that she would become one of Wilfried’s favourite artists. According to her biography, she entered the artscene in 2010, so at the time when she was submitting. For Wilfried, it is always a pleasure if he can follow the development of an artist during a longer period, especially when it becomes obvious it is a talented artist. At latest when Francesca Fini submitted in 2011 her video “Oasis in the desert” to “CologneOFF VII – Art & the City”, she demonstrated her bright talent, and the 12 video submissions during the past 10 years give evidence by combining her talents as a performing and video artist through imaginative and very colourful creations and a critical view on our current time. This feature is a way to honour Francesca for giving the video art world her particular substance, hopefully many more years, yet!
Francesca Fini
www.francescafini.com
bio @ Artists Network Database
Film director, video artist, body art performer. She studied graphics at the IED (European Institute of Design) in Rome, and visual arts and hyper-graphics at the Quasar Institute (Design University). She is also a documentarist working as director and author for the Italian Public Tv. In 2002, she started the collaboration with the American artist Kristin Jones, on the project of Contemporary Art, “Tevereterno” (Eternal Tiber), creating multimedia installations and events for the City of Rome. In 2007, she wrote and directed the independent documentary, “Mollo tutto e vado via” (I’m Giving Up Everything and Going Away) (50 min.). The documentary was distributed by Vitagraph. In the same year she directed “The Battle of the Year”, a documentary on the Italian hip-hop scene (Magic TV). Between October and December of 2008 she was the author and director of the reality-documentary in 12 episodes, “Trans-Europe”, shown on the All Music channel. She continued to work on multimedia works and urban installations, such as “Trilogia”, which was selected for Natale di Roma 2009. In 2009 she wrote and directed “Donne – born to be kings”, a feature length documentary about female transgenderism that is about to be distributed by one of the oldest and most prestigious national distribution Company, the “Istituto Luce”. She also performed at the Body Art Festival “Mutazioni Profane” and at “Pop Porn” Festival of Erotic Art. She is also partecipating to various exhibitions with her digital art and videoart.
Participant in
VideoChannel – [self]~imaging artists portraying themselves in film & video – NewMediaFest’2010
CologneOFF VI – 6th Cologne International Videoart Festival 2010
CologneOFF VII – 7th Cologne International Videoart Festival 2011
CologneOFF VIII – 8th Cologne International Videoart Festival 2012
CologneOFF IX – 9th Cologne International Videoart Festival 2013
CologneOFF X – 10th Cologne International Videoart Festival 2014
animateCOLOGNE 2012
animateCOLOGNE 2013
animateCOLOGNE 2014
animateCOLOGNE 2016
artvideoKOELN – audiovisual experiences 2015
The iTerror Memorial 2016
The Wake Up! Memorial 2017
Francesca Fini is participating in total in about 50 videoart programs curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne shown together with networking partners all over the world.
12 videos
“Cry Me” is a radiography of the soul.
As a woman, I reveal myself through videoart, playing with a tv display
that is like an uterus where my secret “avatar” lives and sings.
The video was inspired somehow by the visceral and visionary
paintings of Frida Kahlo.
The artwork in the display was originally a video shot with a dv camera
and then manipulated into photoshop frame-by-frame, as a digitally
painted animation.
The piece was performed late at night, in Tor Bella Monaca, a very depressed neighborhood in Rome, Italy. In all that desolation and dirt, I’m a crazy lady trying to reach my little spot of peace and warmth. And even if I’m finally resting under the orange lights of an artificial sun, I’m still all alone in the dark. Because in every desert there is a little oasis and in every oasis a little desert.
Parnasus is a video that tells a dream. And like all dreams, it comes from a small image nested in the mind. The image is a marble statue white as snow. I’ve never been driven by the fantasy of Winckelmann that still subdues our imagination. All that white marble disorients me. I feel lost, I need color spots as if they were signs in a map. A misunderstanding, that of Winckelmann, that becomes the metaphor for an even deeper and more dangerous mistake: the illusion that the past, crystallized into a kind of noble and abstract projection, it is always better than us, it is always perfect.
So in my dream I return to the statues the color denied. The color erased by the passage of time as you cancel the losers of history and forget the evils of the world. I return the blood to the ancient statues, and the ferocity and the violence that always pervade human history, in an infinite loop of death and delusion.
An absolute and unbearable violence that with their unreal perfection those white icons had perhaps to exorcise.
A dream that serves to abstract from the dream, to return to talk about the real world.
A video on the obsessive manipulation of my own image, which becomes a metaphor for the general confusion between real and virtual of the “Société du spectacle” prefigured by Guy Debord. The digital culture and its tools become a self-destructive virus. I could work on the face of Osama Bin Laden, but the fake photo-montage spread by the media as proof of his death is already an unattainable work of art . I then brought the concept within myself, in the heart of my “feminine” self-destructiveness, where the pen of the tablet becomes an “augmented” surgical scalpel deep into the void.
How do you see yourself in the mirror? We do not ever see how others see us, we do not see how we really are. Wombs is some sort of dream about femininity. A woman meets her golem, a piece of clay without features, to be fashioned at will. The golem is a double of the woman, but an amorphous double, a newborn entity still sealed in its purity and fierce innocence. A deity (maybe an evil one) who is daughter and mother at the same time, in whose womb the woman hides to find peace.
WHITE SUGAR is a surreal film that narratively and graphically elaborates archival material in the public domain. I selected this material in the course of careful research. I focused in particular on the female figure that is ubiquitous within this linguistic universe, as a sort of granite spokesman of a specific cultural model she apparently adheres without shadows and without uncertainty. A universe that has a very precise historical flavor and that, for some sort of magical projection in space and time, seems to actually tell our time. I’ve isolated these female figurines, literally cutting them out of their context as paper dolls, and then I reassembled them into a new digital space made in 3d. In this transfer the “dolls” lose their connection not only with the narrative context but also the spatial structure in which they “lived” originally, assuming new meanings that crack their role as ambassadors of a granitic and dominant culture. The video revolves around the spooky theme of hypnosis and lucid dreaming, as a representation of western cultural model that is “white sugar”, an artificial and addictive chemical pleasure, altering taste and perception. The graphics are best with anaglyph glasses.
I thought of telling the sense of touch, but with his absence or with its contemporary surrogate: the scarcity of physical contact due to hypertrophic growth of virtual liaisons in social networks, the culture of the avatar, the chaos of magmatic and stratified information and communication between individuals. Thus the scarcity of physical contact that leads to the recognition of the “other” results in a technology that is detached from the body and turns it into cold and solipsistic avatar. In a world where we are almost afraid of physical contact we use the screens of our smartphones and tablets to access the relationship. Is the touch screen the membrane that filters a world that frightens us?
A dadaist ratatouille of images in which food becomes a dream – or nightmare – and the reflection of schizophrenic diets in the claustrophobic frame of a self-portrait.
For perfect view please wear 3d anaglyph glasses.
The civilization of olive tree and laurel leaf are stitched together by a thin red thread that unites the East and the West, along the routes of trade, conquests and migrations.
Five women are making soap, according to Aleppo tradiztion, while other symbolical actions take place.
The videoperformance debuted the 13th of november 2015, at 20 pm, in a famous hair-dresser in Rome. The location creates a contextual shock: beauty and war, east and west, long red hair and a black hijab. We women did the ritual together, unaware that elsewhere, at the same time, horrible crimes were consumed in the name of god.
“The burning” is a video inspired by the recent disturbing political events in America, that gave birth to a series of images in my mind. These images revolve around the idea of obliteration; the obliteration of the past, of the human progress, of a path that seemed established, of values that seemed not negotiable. But everything is burned in one night, in a bonfire that devoured even our disbelief, leaving us dismayed. With hindsight this was all too predictable, the signals were left on our way to be interpreted: globalization, the economic crisis, the moral and material impoverishment of the middle class, the progressive disintegration of society, are spreading throughout the West the virus of obliteration. A metaphorical patina of black paint that blinds, devours and deletes.
