WITH AN HELMET
live art piece by Francesca Fini
Airing Nov 15-21 and Dec 13-19, 2016
As part of the LIVE program
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.