Women Cinemakers those elements carefully is a big part of the production process indeed. Multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced remarked ". Technology can be used to create innovative works, but innovation means not only to create works of art that haven't been before, but especially to what already exists: do you think that one of the roles of artists has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? I guess the role of artists changed several time in history and is still changing today. Just as everything around us, just as society evolves and changes over the years, the artist role also adjusts. It is of course the interaction of many individual artist´s behaviors and choices to make this change. But I am not really sure if the new media technology was the reason for a further change of the artists position to be honest. I see these new technologies more like a new media to be used and explored, just like when the photography came into scene in the beginning of the 19th century. Its one more tool to be used and I am sure there is still much good stuff coming up especially around the notion of mixed media in the contemporary art world. Í more see the individual actors generating slow changes in our social conglomerate, no matter if we intend the artists world or the general society. Actually the globalization and the internet are helpful to push through some other “innovations”, not just in the art world, such as the coming together of women artists and the general attention to the female role as well as the LGBT identity within society. In this sense I guess the artists of today can contribute in a more “global” way to what our society’s shifts are. Over the years your works have been internationally showcased in a wide number of occasions: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish with the viewers, who urged to from a condition of mere spectatorship. As an artist particularly
interested in the role of performance art as a tool to break the boundaries between artist and audience, how do you consider ? And what do you hope your artworks will in the spectatorship? Often I feel like the audience is the most important and interesting element of an art project or show and this ping-pong play of addressing and hopefully receiving feedback or input is the most fun part in the preparatory production phase. Mostly my works are about miscommunication in its various forms and of course the interaction of an animated character talking to the viewer has a massive potential for miscommunication, since there is no real option of exchanging with a digitally generated voice or a moving character on a screen. But at the same time it essentially incorporates exactly what the specific work is about: the fact that being able to communicate and exchange thoughts with someone else is extremely hard work for us. And I can imagine at some point the viewer can feel frustrated, because there is just a one way communication, a sort of monologue they are exposed to. So the thought is that this frustration can push the viewer to acknowledge or even Women Cinemakers
overthink certain mechanisms or topics presented in my works while the spectator is immersed in it and experiences it. But ultimately I am not hoping to trigger nothing specific, since the moment after the encounter with an art work is individually shaped and impossible to foresee or shape in any way. We have appreciated the originality of your artistic production and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ' ', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Oh, I feel we are ages behind of how we should be living today and especially how we should be treating each other. Starting from our way to handle plastic trash, animals, nature, and of course other human beings, women are only one of many so called “minorities” (wtf does this mean anyways?) that have to struggle with their position given by the patriarchal and obsolete categorization of society. What to say about this? No good words cross my mind. But what I can see and what I have witnessed during my life and career is that more and more women choose freely what to do in their lives and how to do it. Of course we are still talking about a small part of all women, those who are born in a more or less peaceful and liberal environment or who had a chance to study and to economically be independent from men etc. There is a long way to go, even though as said in our heads we are already there. But then I often encounter people like the songwriter and Union activist Joe Hill, who wrote a very nice song about a Rebel Girl back in 1914, which ends in saying “We’ve had girls before, but we need some more, In the Industrial Workers of the World, For it’s great to fight for freedom, With a Rebel Girl.” Or if you read “The Conquest of Bread" by Peter Kropotkin that was written already in 1982, you have the feeling that it has just been published, since it describes and deals exactly with what we are dealing with today! Women Cinemakers
So I guess back then some people where already ahead of the status quo that is still on in our time and it is now over 100 years ago that this song was written and still little change is happening. Does it really take so long? I am thinking about Timothy Leary talking to UCLA students in 1967 claiming that there are always old white man deciding what is going on in the world and that this dichotomy should be reversed, since the young people should decide about their political economical and social life and specifically about the direction the general society is heading to. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Catherine. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Right now I am working at some projects for the upcoming shows, there is a lot of research about the first labor unions as well as how materials affected our human history, to keep it broad. Not sure where it will be going to in visual and formal terms, but I guess it will develop somehow into a refined and more punctual way of translating whatever is on my Women Cinemakers mind into a spacial something that you could walk through and which ideally talks directly to you while experiencing it.. My upcoming projects for the spring 2019 are a solo show at Greengrassi Gallery in London, a
solo show at Polansky gallery in Prague, a group show in the Kunstmuseum St Gallen (LOK) in Switzerland and finally my first institutional solo show in Italy at the Museum Villa delle Rose in collaboration with a residency offered by the MAMBO Museum of contemporary art in Bologna. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected] Women Cinemakers
Hello Rebecca and welcome to WomenCinemakers: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production. You have a solid background and you graduated in Amination from IADT, the National Film School in Dublin: how does this experience influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected] your artistic research? College was tough for me. While I made amazing friends, I found my course very challenging. I had come from a Fine Art Portfolio course into this and I expected something more free and expressive. The reality was that the course was very industry driven, which is fine but it wasn’t what I expected. I remember coming in on one of the first days we were meant to bring in a clip of an animation scene we loved. I brought in a clip from Waltz With Bashir, an animated war documentary. It was more of an experimental piece. The method used to make the film was rotoscoping which means the animator drew over footage to create the animation instead of working from scratch. Most Rebecca Flynn Women Cinemakers meets Lives and works in South East London, United Kingdom 404_Error_Not_Found is a representation of the primal frustration one feels when technology doesn't do as it should. It’s set in sort of a dystopian future where all beings are genderless and look the same. The stunted, glitchy movement of the characters evokes a feeling of frustration and unease. The blue characters symbolise us all going about our daily lives. Phones and computers were created to help us and to make life easier however in present times we are now required to have these things and are slaves to them. When the wifi on the bus doesn’t work or when an app won’t load or even just when your phone dies and you can’t charge it people feel so distraught and lost when these things happen. This is represented with the glitching effect. We reply on these devices for so much, they are our computers, our cameras, our maps, our source of entertainment. The little animations between scenes are to create the feeling of switching channels or apps on your phone and simulate the feeling of ads flashing up on our screens.
Rebecca Flynn Photo by Aoife Moiselle
Women Cinemakers other clips brought in were from classic animations with a traditional style. I remember being told something like “Well this clip doesn’t really contain many of the 12 Principles of Animation”. These 12 principles are what makes Disney animation so appealing to your eye, however this wasn’t something that interested me at all. Art and creativity has always flowed from me easily and it is something I love and can get lost in but animation felt like doing a math equation to me. I saw others flourish and show their personality through animation and I struggled at working in the medium. This really set the tone for my four years there I think. I felt I was in the wrong place. (Except for the few glimmers of hope like Life Drawing class with the wonderful artist Laura Venables.) For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected a captivating experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the duality between reality and imagination is the way the results of your artistic research provides the viewers with such an intense visual experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of 404_Error_Not_Found, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? Well leading on from the previous question I chose to reject the rules I had been struggling to follow throughout college. This is why I chose to do such an absurd film. A film should have a good story, an arc, 404_Error_Not_Found does not have that. The animation is stunted looking. The timing is weird. I had seen work from David O’Reilly an Irish 3D animator who had gone to my college briefly but left and was inspired by him. During the summer before my last year in college I interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers started attempting glitch art. I took raw data from images, brought them into the sound editing software Audacity and broke them by putting audio effects on the raw data and exporting them as images once again. It created amazing colours and shapes. I decided to embrace what I felt was right for me instead of trying to fit into a mould I wasn’t cut out for. I teamed up with the very talented Ciaran Talbot and he built the glitching blue character rigs in Maya that appear in my film. Caoimhe Hogan also helped with the initial character design. 404_Error_Not_Found is set in sort of a dystopian future where all beings are genderless and look the same. This piece was done in tandem with my thesis “Examining the Internet music genre Vaporwave as a postmodern art movement and subculture, comparing it to Dada, Pop Art and Punk.” My thesis looked at Vaporwave as an art movement and a comment on consumerism and capitalism similar to Dadaism and Pop Art and Punk. Vaporwave encompasses music, fashion and art. I wanted to incorporate the vaporwave aesthetic into my film. Vaporwave uses a lot of collage in the art side and plunderphonics in the music side of things. It’s both futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. It incorporates 80s/90s computer graphics with Roman busts and glitch art. My study of vaporwave and postmodern art helped me find inspiration for the aesthetic of my film, not just visually but the music and sound which I was closely involved in choosing. My colour palette also took inspiration from vaporwave art. Dada, Punk and vaporwave all have a quite nihilistic viewpoint and I felt that too at the time and I wanted my film to express this. I didn’t want to leave the viewer with a moral of the story, I didn’t even necessarily want to convey a message that “Technology is bad” because I don’t think that. Here I am doing an interview for an online magazine! interview
Technology is great! The film was simply meant to be a funny, nihilistic look at ourselves as a society. feature such an ambitious fusion between reminders to everyday life's experience and digital world, addressing the viewers to question the nature of their perceptual categories: how do you consider the relationship between perceptual reality and the realm of imagination? Moreover, how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? When researching for my thesis I became really interested in the idea of hyper reality and non places. I worked as a manager in a big international chain store in a shopping centre while attending college. There was something about the shopping centre that fascinated me. A shopping centre is a non place. It’s a nothing space built just for consuming. Shopping malls are a big feature
of vaporwave so sometimes I would come up with ideas in work for my film. Vaporwave music often pulls from Muzak. A few examples of Muzak would be elevator music and shopping mall background music. Marc Auge, a French writer who coined the term “nonplace” also wrote about hyper-reality. Hyper-reality is an inability to distinguish a simulation from reality especially in a postmodern, technologically advanced society. I wanted to channel this feeling in my film. I went for very minimal backgrounds so you get where the character is with little information. There’s a sense of emptiness but because they are very everyday situations we all identify with them. I wanted the imagery and sound to evoke that feeling that vaporwave does. Futuristic and nostalgic at the same time in the hopes of triggering some feeling in the viewers. I purposefully didn’t have a story arc or a real ending to give a weird, offbeat and jarring feeling.
Women Cinemakers We have highly appreciated the way accomplishes the difficult task of establishing direct relations with the viewers: to emphasize the need of establishing a total involvement between the work of art and the spectatorship, Swiss visual artist Pipilotti Rist once remarked that "we are trying to build visions that people can experience with their whole bodies, because virtual worlds cannot replace the need for sensual perceptions." Do you aim to provide your spectatorship with an enhanced visual experience capable of working as an extension of ordinary perceptual parameters? 404_Error_Not_Found is a representation of the primal frustration one feels when technology doesn't do as it should. I think we all know this feeling. I catch myself sometimes when I am struggling with simple things like maybe the wifi is playing up. We’ve become so complacent with technology that we forget how amazing it is and how privileged we are to access it. When you get mad a web page is taking too long to load or your Chromecast isn’t connecting take a moment to think about the process behind making these devices work. To simply make a phone call the phone converts our voice into an electronic signal which is sent as a radio wave with the help of cell phone towers and satellites. It’s pretty amazing! I want people to watch my film and then take a moment to check themselves before losing it when they are in a similarly frustrating situation. With the stunted, glitchy movement of the characters I wanted to evoke a feeling of frustration and unease. The blue characters symbolise us all going about our daily lives. Phones and computers were created to help us and to make life easier however in present times we are now required to have these things and are slaves to them. When the wifi on the bus doesn’t work or when an app won’t load or even just when your phone dies and you can’t charge it we feel so distraught/furious/lost. This is represented with the glitching effect. We rely on these devices for so much, they are our computers, our cameras, our maps, our source of entertainment. The little animations between scenes are to interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers create the feeling of switching channels or apps on your phone and simulate the feeling of ads flashing up on our screens. Sound plays an important role in your video and we have appreciated the way the soundtrack provides with such an ethereal and a bit enigmatic atmosphere: how do you see ? The sound was very important for me, yes. To decide who produced the sound for our films our class met with the Creative Music course and we had mini meetings almost like speed dating with the different students to see who was best suited to what we were going for. My sound was done by Dean MacManus with the help of Geoffrey Perrin and Sam Saunders. Dean and I worked together to source suitable sounds. Because the inspiration behind the aesthetic of the film was vaporwave it was important to incorporate that into the sound. Vaporwave fuses nostalgia with futuristic. It relies on plunderphonics, like a sound collage. I love working with collage in my personal artwork so bringing that to the sound was fun. The aesthetic of the film is very collage-like and I wanted the sound to reflect this. I didn’t want a score or any foley. Some students were recording real sounds to put in their films, footsteps, voice overs all of that. I knew I wanted us to gather digital sounds and piece them together to suit as this was authentic to the vibe of 404_Error_Not_Found. I wanted to pull from my childhood so people my age might hear something familiar even if they didn’t know quite what it was. One of the glitch sounds is a Venasaur cry from the old Pokemon Gameboy games. In the GPS scene when my character is bumping into the wall the sound is from when the character from the Pokemon Gameboy games bumps into walls. I think there’s an interview
Women Cinemakers interview old school Mario sound in there somewhere too. Of course the dial up internet sound had to make an appearance. Dean also included some of his own music for example in the cut away with the Air Force 1 sneaker rotating. While doing my thesis I made posts on vaporwave subreddits for research and here I found Melonade (a Scottish producer) who gave me permission to use his song for the end credits of my film. At the time the Shooting Stars meme was at its prime so I wanted to use the little dog rig Ciaran had made with some funky upbeat music to evoke the same vibe of that meme without being too direct. Another interesting project that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled and can be viewed at and that you recently completed with Berlin based photographer Hue Hale. It's no doubt that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines? This was such a fun photography project. Hue’s concept was about objectification and fetishization. It was inspired by sexually aggressive messages received online that made him feel personally violated and question the content of his photography he was uploading on social media. I loved this idea of expressing this feeling of violation in a visual way through the 3D tentacles wrapped around the model’s body. It was different for me as the concept was totally his and I was just helping his vision come to fruition. Collaborating is so important. Often creatives can feel competitive especially with social media. Sometimes you think everyone else is more successful than you or they are working
Women Cinemakers
A still from Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers harder than you when in reality you are seeing the highlight reel of everyone’s lives. I was so happy to do this project with Hue as he is so talented and produces beautiful work. Working with friends can sometimes be tough, creative differences can arise, work schedules differ but we worked so well together. Touch With Your Eyes really helped me realise that pooling your skills with other artists can produce some professional quality work. After college I felt quite deflated and lacking in confidence in regards to my art and skill set but this project really showed me to work with what I have and to reach out. Send your work to open calls, collaborate with friends, create opportunities for yourself! As a result of this our project did really well! We exhibited this in London with the F-Off Collective and it was also featured in District Magazine’s Guide To Dublin, Totally Dublin magazine and Subvrt online magazine. As an artist particularly involved in digital techniques, we would like to ask you a question about the relationship between the influence of digital technologies, the online technosphere and creative process. Do you think that digital technologies could fuel artists' processes, by providing them with a new kind of sensitiveness? And how do you consider the relationship between technology and your art making? I grew up painting and drawing and sticking things together, collaging, very hands on. Recently I have been working almost totally digitally. It took time to get used to drawing on a tablet and to wrap my head around photoshop and after effects. At first I was so against it and couldn’t get used to not drawing with a real pencil and paper. Now with practice I feel I am getting better and better and a lot more comfortable with the programs. Of course the glitch work I do in solely digital. I did the 3D modelling of the objects and backgrounds in my film which was a learning curve too. It’s good to challenge yourself with new programs like that. Of course I still draw in my sketchbook very often and nothing replaces that. It’s a tactile experience and very soothing to feel a pen or pencil on paper or working on something with your hands. There’s something special when you go to an exhibition and you can see the textures on a painting or an illustration and you know that is a one off piece interview
Women Cinemakers that cannot be truly replicated. I remember a tutor in my portfolio course said the beauty of screen printing and work of that nature is often the mistakes. You can’t really get that with digital. Working digitally is amazing though because the reality is materials are expensive, they are messy. I like having everything laid out in front of me and getting a little nest together and working for hours which isn’t possible sometimes in a small apartment or when you are sharing a space. If you don’t have access to a studio and have limited money to work with digital is great. You can get drawing tablets so cheap these days. I like to combine traditional with digital. Every artist now has a social media page, an instagram, a facebook page, artstation is another one. It can be damaging to people’s creative process but for me I don’t stress about it and I don’t stress about what other people are doing. I find it pushes me to work more often. I used to be shy about sharing work. Even when I was a little kid and my mom would show off my drawings to my aunties or something I would cringe so hard because it felt so personal to me. A lot of artists have that. Instagram has helped me develop as an artist. You see artists posting their work in progress online or tips on how they work. It’s very helpful and inspiring for me. We daresay that your practice highlights how the impetuous way modern technology has came out on the top has dramatically revolutionized our lives as well as the idea of Art itself: we daresay that new media will soon fill the apparent dichotomy between art and technology, to assimilate one to each other: as an artist particularly interested in contemporary culture’s obsession with internet culture, what's your opinion about the relationship between artistic production and the online technosphere? In particular, does in your opinion online technopshere affect the consumption of art by the audience? interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers For sure I think there’s a lot of conversation among the art community at the moment about what social media and the internet in general is doing for art. Is it cheapening art? Is it democratising it? Is it negative or positive? I remember hearing a fine artist say they hated the idea of someone scrolling past their art on an instagram feed. I think that’s a relevant point and there will always be a place for museums and galleries. For someone like me who works mainly digitally I embrace it. There’s a pool of inspiration out there. With tutorials you can teach yourself anything. It’s much more accessible. It dispels some of the elitism that art is only for the wealthy and educated. For my thesis I studied online curation and the democratisation of art. Even live gigs are now streamed across the internet with the likes of Boiler Room. Madonna is quoted to have said of Jean-Michel Basquiat “He loathed the idea that art was appreciated by an elite group. He used to say he was jealous of me because music is more accessible and it reached more people.” There are now even online art shows. The Internet Moon Gallery is an online gallery worth checking out. It was founded by Manuel Minch and hosts some really unique and strange exhibitions. UCLA Design Media Arts students created a similar online gallery space. They recreated the New Wight gallery into an online gallery space called the “New New Wight Gallery” where “The physics are broken” and free from the limitations of the real world. I love ideas like this. I was also involved in something like that myself with fellow artist Aoife Moiselle. We have collaborated in the past and have an ongoing video art project called Uisce Bitchez and with this project we were chosen to take part in an online residency for The Wrong Water online exhibition with the Peripheral Forms collective. Uisce Bitchez is inspired by the consumerist nature of the current craze of artesian bottled water. We do parody “reviews” of fancy bottled water. You can check this out on our instagram @uisce_bitchez, uisce (pronounced: ish-ka) is Irish for water. interview
We have appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? I totally felt this in college. I definitely felt there was a double standard. I had a hard time in college; I was working while doing an intensive course, far from my family and I remember being brought into a feedback session. I was taken aside by two male lecturers and one said something along the lines of “Look we can see you’re struggling, why don’t you go and do something in makeup or fashion instead, maybe this isn’t for you” and before I left the room we shook hands and I was told by him “there is so shame in a minimum wage job”. It was so bizarre, I was so shocked in the moment I didn’t reply and I never reported it because I already felt things were against me and going up against the lecturers more so wasn’t going to work in my favour. I was so shocked and deflated and I really thought I was going to quit at that point but it actually spurred me on to keep going. I graduated college with such a lack of confidence in my work, I felt I had no skill set. I refused to believe it when someone complimented my film. Then I got the news that out of the whole class 404_Error_Not_Found was picked with only two or three other films by Melbourne International Animation Festival for a screening of best new films coming out of IADT. More recently I had it exhibited with The Ugly Duck Collective in London and received an award from London City Film Festival for Best Animation with it too. Seeing people watch my film and laugh and react is so rewarding and humbling. I’m finally starting to accept my work as valid because it definitely wasn’t seen that way in college. I have been illustrating my whole life and my Women Cinemakers interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
passion was completely tainted for me after college I felt I couldn’t draw something if it wasn’t perfect which lead to not drawing/creating at all. I’m not bashing my college though I am so thankful to have attended IADT. I think it was a very unique college experience. It was so special to have a whole community of like minded individuals and I met so many wonderful people there. I would encourage any woman in art or in any field to try something outside the box. I felt like I was looked on as a slacker in my class because I was struggling. It’s easy to say but have confidence in yourself and your ability and your voice. Don’t be afraid of being imperfect or making mistakes. Support your artist friends too! The art community can be competitive because you think there are only a certain number of opportunities out there but lift each other up. If I see someone I know starting to sell prints or t-shirts or start up something I love to try and support if I can. I would recommend listening to The Steebie Weebie podcast episode 82. The guest is graphic designer and illustrator Sophia Chang. I found her super inspiring because she is so successful doing something she loves and she talks all about reaching out to brands, let people know you exist, research the brands you want to work with and contact the correct people. If you send out 100 emails maybe you will get that one response from the right person. Everybody wants this insta fame. It reminds me of the quote “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”. I think people have a hope that if they post the right things with the right hashtags at the right time of day that they’ll wake up one morning and their post from the night before will have gone viral but the reality is that doesn’t happen for most people and you just have to get your name out there because success/happiness/fulfillment won’t fall into your lap. Women Cinemakers interview
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Rebecca. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I’ve been doing a lot of illustration lately. I do really want to get back into animation and plan on setting myself a few personal projects to get the ball rolling once again. I’m open for commissions and always open to collaborate with other artists. Since moving to London I’m trying to widen my circle and get to know other artists. At the moment I am working with Cailín a non-profit collective in London connecting female and non binary identifying individuals from all backgrounds socially, creatively and intellectually. I’m really excited about this and we are going to be organising an official launch party soon. We hope to showcase artists and influential, inspiring characters. People can check that out on our instagram@cailinldn. Thanks so much for this wonderful opportunity and thoughtful questions! Women Cinemakers interview
Women Cinemakers
Hello Łucja and welcome to : we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a MA of Arts, that you received from Akademia Sztuk Pięknych we Wrocławiu: how did this experience influenced your evolution as an artist? An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected] Moreover, how does your due to your Polish roots and your current life in the United Kingdom direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Hello and thank you for inviting me to WomenCinemamakers. Studying at Art University definitely gave me quite traditional training and that led to confidence and freedom to use different techniques. I mainly studied painting, but also learnt a lot of fine art disciplines, which is why I guess I like to experiment. I feel my emotional Lucja Grodzicka Women Cinemakers meets Lives and works in London, United Kingdom Between is inspired by female body. The way it is shown by media, the stereotypes we as a society cultivate, the myths about female sexuality, the moral standards we are living in.
Women Cinemakers states cannot be expressed in only one technique. My art work is strictly linked with the female body and freedom. This is probably from growing up in Poland, which was (and still is) quite a conservative, Catholic country, where female expression, in the mainstream, is subdued. In the UK, on the other hand, there is a greater sense of freedom with what a woman does with her body. This has only made my opinions on the female body stronger. I find it ridiculous that people linked to the church and the governing party in Poland openly suppress art and movies which apparently offend religious feelings. That would never happen in UK. On top of that it is very important for me to travel and meet other people with different opinions. For this special edition of we have selected , a stimulating experimental film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into is the way it provides the viewers with such a multi-layered visual interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers experience: when walking our readers through of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? During a lone residency in Greenland, I spent time reading up on Inuit society. Inuit society traditionally places greater value on males over females. Chores these days are shared in their subsistence-oriented lifestyles, although responsibilities related to hunting and fishing still tend to be divided by gender - men typically do the hunting, while women attend to drying the meat, harvesting of the skins, etc. The split in responsibilities is reflected in the black-andwhiteness of the video. I spent a month in Greenland and experience complete lack of day light, which is quite hard to deal with. That influenced the visual part of my production the most. The feeling of the sun being close, hidden behind the horizon, not close enough to give you full day light, gives you the feeling of being behind a closed curtain. We dare say that could be considered an effective allegory of in our media driven societies: would you tell us how important is for you that the spectatorship interview
the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? And how do you consider the relation between the real and the imagined? I make my art to make people think. This project was created in a period of time where I had almost no contact with the outside world, very different to the business of London, which gave me a unique opportunity to reconsider my values in life. There was a freedom of time that most people can relate with. I think quite a lot about whether there is any difference between the real and the imagined. They have an intertwined relationship,
dependant on the individual’s perception. Everyone creates their own reality, alongside the reality shown by the media, politicians etc. Freedom can be measured as the level of opportunity to turn what you imagine into reality. We have deeply appreciated the way explores the theme of the representation of female body by media and the stereotypes we as a society cultivate: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, " ": does your artistic research
Women Cinemakers respond to ? I don’t have a specific moment in which I decided to create art against the male-driven beauty stereotypes. It has always been in me – my parents raised me to believe knowledge was more important than looks, as well as being tolerant to different opinions and respecting freedom. I’ve never wanted to be a “trophy wife”, and as I get older, the feminist feeling becomes more radical. I think it’s an ongoing process – when a government somewhere in the world tries to ban abortion, to the clothes and make-up people expect you to wear, the sex you choose to be, or if the “head of the family” will allow you to go out alone or drive a car. I could never understand how someone can feel like it is their right to tell another person what to do. We like that way invites the viewers to question the way women’s identity is constructed through the perception of others, in our globalized still patriarchal and maleoriented age: what do you hope will trigger in the viewers? Moreover, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with ? interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers