The Gut
Chanhee Choi
live art piece by Francesca Fini
The protagonists of the performance are offered naked and vulnerable to the audience. They wear working helmets as an ironic transposition of the legendary helmet of Scipio that, in this case, relates the rhetoric of the Roman glorious past, of which there remains not even the dust, with the unheard sufferings of the true heroes of everyday life in this country. They are the ones who live “with an helmet” and sometimes die with it, in factories and dockyards, while what is left of their stories is hastily hidden under the carpet of this diseased country. On their arms I place electrodes that cause strong involuntary muscle contractions forcing the workers to a grotesque dance that makes the flag moving on its own, to the beat of the national anthem. What is left in a dying country is just the mechanical and grotesque rhetoric of the national anthem and the respect demanded but devoid of any genuine feeling. A collective weariness and resignation that turns into hysteria when the puppeteers also discover their wires and the simple act of drinking a glass of wine becomes a fight against a greater, dark and invincible power.
The performance is one of the episodes of a larger project, open and traveling, that will grow with guerrilla performing throughout 2013. Learn more: withanhelmet.blogspot.it
Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist mainly focused on new media, experimental cinema and performance art. She lives and works in Rome. The focus of her work is always the body and its own narrative power, but inserted in a sort of exuberant “multimedia pot” where live videoart pieces are mixed with generative audio, lo-fi technologies and homemade interaction design devices, with handicraft masks, bizarre costumes and feminist steam-punk props popping out everywhere.
Among the most important art events in which she participated in the last few years, we would mention the 2011 WRO Biennale in Poland, the River-to-River Festival in New York, the ADD Digital Art Festival in Rome, Laguna International Art Prize in Venice, the Venice International Performance Art Week, FILE Festival in Brasil, the Berlin Directors Lounge, Ikono Tv Festival and the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival in Chicago. In 2014 she was selected for the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, organized by the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was also invited in Kolkata, where she lectured and performed at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute. In 2014 she participated in the International Watermill Center Summer Program. In 2015 she directed in Rome the firts edition of HI> DANCE Festival, dedicated to contemporary dance and technology. In the same year she won the Prix Université Blaise Pascal des étudiants and the Prize Conseil Général du Puy-de-Dome during Videoformes Festival in Clermont-Ferrand. She is currently working on a new experimental feature film with the collaboration of Cinecittà Istituto Luce.
Usumurasaki Kana
Paint and performance about my identity
David Ian Bellows/Griess
tv in the parking lot
2:39 min, 2016
production worker: David Ian Bellows/Griess
camera: Elizabeth Lamb
driver: Neil Griess
omaha stakes
11:31 min, 2016
VHS to digital transfer
production worker: David Ian Bellows/Griess
camera: David Ian Bellows/Griess
audio collage: Neil Griess
video sample: MEATTRUCK, 2015, 01:45:44, Andrew Braddock, David Ian Bellows/Griess, Elizabeth lamb
tv in the garage
5:53 min, 2016
VHS to digital transfer
production worker: David Ian Bellows/Griess
camera: David Ian Bellows/Griess
Videos courtesy of HUMAN TRASH DUMP, a video label.
David Ian Bellows/Griess (born 1984 – Omaha, NE) is a sculptor, video maker, and unretired performance artist.
Jen Clay
Allon Allou: Mothers and Fathers, 9 min
Allon Allou: Schools, 11:20 min
Allon Allou: Friends, 5:19 min
Allon Allou: Hospitals, 4:38 min
Allon Allou is a web based series made up of episodes that utilize the structure of children’s educational television programs such as Sesame Street and Yo Gabba Gabba. Allon and allou mean other and another respectively in Greek. This project includes DIY assemblage, wearable and performative sculptures, and stop motion animation. The themes of the episodes are mothers and fathers, friends, hospitals, homes, schools. Allon Allou allude to possibilities of dysfunction and trauma through the imaginary depiction of broken systems that lie behind smilingly healthy places and people. In the video series the inner parts of the buildings, people and characters are exposed as way to depict how the past environments have constructed their current selves. Erwin W. Straus, M.D Ph.D. explains the experiences of the other in the Phenomenology of Hallucinations, with the use of the term allon. Straus wrote “ Sickness estranges from our body; then the body is turned into an object, a thing no longer to be trusted. Stricken by dis-ease, we discover the power of the allon in ourselves.”
Poster by Amy Ruddick, RE/NIGHT/LIVE/MARE, 2016
November 1 – December 31, 2016
Concept by Joseph Herring
Programmed by Joseph Herring, Kera MacKenzie, and Andrew Mausert-Mooney
RE/NIGHT/LIVE/MARE re- considers your nightmares; re- examines your daydreams; re- contextualizes pre-existing (video art? videotaped performance work? found footage?) through re- presenting, re- editing, re -mixing. Featuring works that re- search, re- consider, re- examine, re- contextualize nightmares, daydreams, flying-fancies, hyper-realities. Also included: live re- mixing pre- existing work with new live footage to re- consider it in under the cold, hard, clinical (or soft warm fuzzy *wicked grin ) light of the telematic screen.
RE/NIGHT/LIVE/MARE includes work by Alejandro Sajgalik, Antonio Anton, Arthur Tuoto, Blanca Rego, Chanhee Choi, Chris Collins, Dakota Gearhart, Danielle Zorbas, David Ian Bellows/Griess, Devin Harclerode, DSK (Juan Lesta & Belén Montero), Dxn Anahí, Eden Mitsenmacher, Francesca Fini, Heejin Jang, Isabelle McGuire, Jan & Dave, Janelle VanderKelen, Jen Clay, Katya Yakubov, Lana Z Caplan, Lauren Kimball-Brown & Julia Zinn, Lauren Valley, Leslie Rogers, Lili White, Lori Felker, Maddie Hewitt, Manuela De Laborde, Mark Kent, Nowhere Mountain, Paul Wiersbinski, Richard Haley, Tommy Becker, Usumurasaki, Vivian Ostrovsky, Yvette Granata, and Zachary Epcar.
Featuring live broadcasts by Alejandro T. Acierto, Jan & Dave, Jen Clay, and Richard Haley.
Part 1: RE (Nov 1-7, Nov 29-Dec 5)
This live broadcast will take the form of lecture discussing various possibilities of using my future corpse to create sculpture. This will be an attempt to locate the state between being and becoming a thing. Weight, mass, heat, and warm fluids will be tracked from their origins as building blocks of personhood and mapped to their dissension/ascension into purely spatial attributes disavowed from the body.
Transmit 2.0 is an audio/visual broadcast work that highlights the complex relationship we have with communication technologies.
Let’s Be Friends is a performance where The Void, an untrustworthy character that is the manifestation of being afraid of the dark, speaks directly to the audience so that they may become “friends”.
Zombie Tom Petty and the Mystery of My Dead Little Pony gives us what we all need, a fighting chance to save the world from the Apocalypse; and that chance is none other than Zombie Tom Petty. With the assistance of friends like My Little Pony, an inflatable kangaroo, a bubble wand and the Devil himself, Zombie Tom Petty sets off on an adventure with potentially dire consequences for each and every one of us.