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FRANCESCA FINI
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Francesca Fini
Experimental filmmaker, live media performer, digital artist
Experimental Films
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01:31:04
OFELIA NON ANNEGA, 2016
This is a performance-based art film, a layered and multifaceted cinematic experience, a work made of collaged hybridizations. The film was made by combining historical archival footage, selected from the film Archive collected by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, and original performance art pieces that I conceived inspired by the repertoire itself. The film moves between provocative body-art and body-manipulation scenes, visually engaging ideas and mesmerizing scenarios and costumes, disturbing living installations, and the celebration of feminine beauty and strength. At the center of the story is an Ophelia who is different from the one-handed down by the literary tradition: not a shy and fragile teenager, but many women of different colors, features, and ages. A modern and bittersweet Ophelia. An Ophelia who in the end does not drown, rejecting her destiny as a romantic heroine to become a "normal person."
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53:25
HIPPOPOETESS, 2018
Plump, stubborn, unconventional, offbeat, ambitious, unstoppable: the hippopotamus poetess is one of us! Hippopoetess is an experimental animation-based film that tells the story of the American writer Amy Lowell and her desire to succeed in a world dominated by men. A visual symphony that mixes the languages of the documentary, performance, video art, and 3d animation, to give back, with an absolutely experimental and poetic style, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, the story of this interesting figure. With her fatness, her ambition, her intrusiveness, her resourcefulness, her contempt for conventions, her boisterous and stubborn character, her inability to “remain in her place”, her braveness in dealing with the men of her times and assert her ideas, I immediately fell in love with Amy, a militant feminist without knowing she was one.
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01:02:41
LOOKING FOR OZ, 2016
This is a sixty-minute experimental film that I wrote and directed in Jerusalem in May 2016, upon invitation of the New Media Department of Musrara Art School. The film is a performance-based production made of symbolic actions staged around the city, with the participation of local artists and performers, while visually strong imagery and guerrilla-like actions involved the community in a game of provocations on the theme of identity and belonging.
Selected Videos
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06:25
PARADISE LOST, 2022
An alien creature wanders in a dreamlike and mysterious landscape that seems on the verge of collapsing at the first breath of wind. This film was born from the artist's desire to tell a recurring dream. In this dream, the unpleasant sensation of falling into the void - which we have all experienced at least once - fades into the feeling of precariousness and uncertainty characterizing our times. From the pandemic to the war in Ukraine, current events seem to mark a kind of countdown to nowhere. This alienating and dreamlike scenario is inhabited by strange and fantastic creatures who seem entrusted with the task of preserving the very essence of our animal nature.
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06:01
RE-FLUO, 2022
RE-FLUO is a project that investigates the AI-based photogrammetry technology that encounters chaos and error. What happens when we take a 'selfie' with a 3d scanner? First of all, we have to think that we will no longer be projected, cell by cell, pixel by pixel, on that invisible and two-dimensional screen that ideally separates us from the phone. We must move, let ourselves be explored slowly, inch by inch. We have to disclose our bodies, and turn around to reveal the interstices. 3D photography is a dynamic, empirical experience: a dance with light that relies on the imperfect intelligence of the device, which interprets, senses, reconstructs and puts together our fragmentary simulacrum. And what happens if you decide to stress the device towards imperfections and glitches, embracing the beauty of chaos and error? For example, what happens if I start scanning my face in 'face mode' and then I introduce an inorganic object in the picture, with unnatural colors and a too-perfect shape to belong to Nature? A plastic wreck, a scrap saved from the waste bin? The software does not know how to interpret and integrate the intruder, the mysterious object, and then elaborates improbable Cronenbergian digital meltings, conceived by the crazy algorithm that stops recording and starts dreaming. And what happens when these unreal agglomerations of pixel and color are transferred into a 3D software, illuminated with a virtual light, coated with a digital porcelain patina, and rendered with the metaphysical setting of a rendering engine? RE-FLUO is a contemporary self-portrait experiment for artificial intelligence, a 3D scanner, and household waste.
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29:26
DOPO TANTA NEBBIA, 2021
In the great show of the new health emergency, the acrylic shield has become a new fourth wall, but it is also a screen where our daily dreams and fears are projected. Acrylic screen, light, shadow, red and black paint, and the words of Ungaretti, are the materials of the new performance by Francesca Fini, an absolute preview for Ibrida Festival 2021.
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17:02
PLANET PINK / PANOPTICON1, 2021
My Panopticon is a landscape where the waste of humanity accumulates, the bundled and forgotten things that contain their destiny. A dump of hopes, passions, and relics of a creative and devouring species. Our memories then become ballast, poison, and detritus. We are a virus, as Agent Smith said in The Matrix, grasshoppers mesmerized by the sound of the herd's blind meal. And so the lines taken from the iconic ballad 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, become an obsessive and alienating chant, punctuating the fall towards the abyss/origin of our civilization. Because we were unable to overcome technological adolescence, and Culture, which was to save us, turned out to be the Trojan horse of our animal Nature.
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40:41
SCONFINAMENTO - full performance, 2020
During the COVID-19 lockdown, the Italian squares, always so full of life and rowdy, were suddenly silent and deserted, while life was hiding inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. Daily life, once feverish, has become a fleeting and ephemeral circumstance: the squares were controlled by police vans, enlivened by the flight of a seagull, by a flag in the wind, by a runner's bicycle, by a couple wearing masks while walking the dog. And so the loners adventuring in the confined city were narrative elements of a dystopian and cinematic story, which I started spying on avidly, through the dense system of tourist and surveillance webcams, accessible via the web, which I have discovered oversee almost every city in Italy. While I was locked in my studio, it gave me relief to look 'outside', to spy those beautiful airy and sunny squares - the places where I would have had an aperitif and a nice dinner, under normal conditions, through this virtual window on my computer screen. I also came to project these images, on the wall of my room, as in a new panopticon urged by the discomfort of the quarantine. At that point, being an artist working with live media and interaction design, I decided to take the next step. Through motion tracking technology, I grabbed the webcam feed and passed it to a software, specially compiled for this project, which records and visually tracks the movement of people, vehicles, and animals, processing all the data flow and turning it into a concert for synth: movements generate sounds, modulations, graphic visualizations, digital effects. Finally, I returned everything back to the network, through a series of live streaming on Facebook, in a creative ring of real-time manipulations and interpretations.
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13:15
VANITAS VANITATUM, 2020
Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas (from Latin: the vanity of vanities, and all things are vanity), is a famous biblical passage taken from Ecclesiastes, often cited to affirm the emptiness of earthly concerns and the ephemeral character of the joys and glories achieved in the material world. This concept is the basis of the memento mori: the allegorical still-life, where an hourglass glittering in the dark, a skull resting on a book, a flickering candle next to a window, remind us of the transience of beauty and the fragility of the human condition. Starting from this principle, I once again practice my technique of fake found-footage, which consists in the processing of impossible films, created through the surrealist animation of static images that belong to pre-cinematographic cultures. Ancient prints, paintings, miniatures, tapestries, and portraits of the past come to life, inside a digital time machine that collects imaginary artifacts and fragments over the centuries, recomposing them in a contemporary three-dimensional landscape. A landscape that magically comes to life again in the present, but only to decompose before our eyes, devoured by digital insects, or simply falling asleep in front of the animated hourglass in the screen of a Mac Classic running out of memory. In the two screens side by side, we will see the original image and its animated contemporary reworking.
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07:18
SKINNED, 2018
A Dadaist collage that plays on the concept of identity, elaborated through impossible selfies taken by the protagonists of famous masterpieces in the history of portraiture and self-portrait. These portraits come alive, piercing the boundaries of their temporal and cultural definition. Then suddenly they grab a smartphone, they call and maybe wait, the eternal expectation of those who meet a call center. Contemporary everyday life insinuates itself, alienating and alienated, within the lyrical, utopian, and idealized world of a portrait. What do you hide under your skin, flayed by the toxic radiation of mobile phones? What would Leonardo da Vinci or Andy Warhol have done with this evil device?
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05:24
FAIR AND LOST, 2012
This is probably my most famous work, ad it’s a video-performance art piece, which means that it’s a performative action made for the camera. During the live performative version in front of an actual audience, I wear therapy electrodes on both arms, set to maximum voltage, and try to put on makeup. Involuntary muscle contractions caused by electric shock are very strong so that I cannot control the hands and the makeup spreads all over, turning my face into a grotesque mask. The hysterical, uncontrollable, movement of the hand represents the disease of social habit, which reveals its fragility when the system appears on the point of collapsing: the deep conflict between conscious behavior and external social conditioning. Even crying is involuntary, caused by the black pencil and mascara entering my eyes since I cannot calibrate the movement of the hand. A mechanical cry that is automatically transmitted to the audience, in a sort of empathic conditioned connection, unconscious and therefore completely useless.
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04:30
A TIME TRAVEL, 2019
A portrait of Dorian Gray (in reality, the “Portrait of a young man”, by Nicolaes Maes, 1675 - 1685 ) floats in the stellar void, in the primordial soup of a timeless world. The handsome young man has only to push a button to turn on the time machine and begin his journey through the history of humanity that blends with legends, literature, and mythology.
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