So much of our communication and learning occurs through the computer technologies, disembodied living seems ever more inevitable. As our technological capacities grow, we are looking for ways to reconnect with our bodies, our creativity and our spirits - Daria Halprin
I am a self-taught video artist. How does my internal environment look like, feel like? How does it relate to the external environment? These are my guideline questions. The camera is like my third eye, a spiritual guide and technology a patriarchal archetype to disobey and mess around with.
Video making has been an intimate DIY discovery process of trying everything out filled with the excitement of Mistake making.
Diverting my attention away from what I truly need the most: connection to the flesh of nature, technology has been mediating a slowing down almost meditative gratifying process of deeper owned learning. Trapped either behind or in front of a mysterious magnifying man-made glass contraption, I craft my emotions out to bring nature inside (of technology). In other terms the computer is a laboratory where to run alchemic experiments.
My point of view is that of the emotional inner body claiming a messy beyond appearances aesthetic. The aesthetics of the inner world is a beauty that wants to be free of consumerism and cultural restrictions that in Daria Haprin words limit the body and soul’s imagination.
A limited keenness, and therefore knowledge and accessibility, to high end professional technology, have been intentional parameters within which to push my creativity and rebel against overall technical expectations and conventions. The gesture embedded in my soft digital “processing”, where high sensitivity compensates low technical skills, is that of learning how to draw the line and own my mark.
The overall spirit is to make the most out of very little. Combining amateurish rudimental tools to trial and error “techniques”. Video is my opportunity to play with the manifestation of the unconscious and introduce it to the realm of counsciousness. It’s a space where to recognise and seep through what comes out of my body. In this space of deep observation, deep listening and filtering, like a witch, I too, play with the alchemical magic of digital transformation.
Not concerning myself too much with principles of imaging quality, nor adhering to professional video making rules or conventions, gives me the freedom to create often messy, murky, soft, overall “offish” videos that reflect my lunar resistance to technology. This “methodology” is the vital embodiment of the concept of my art practice that connects me to feminist art making history.
I film with the intention of recording the action of a body within an environment, framing how body and surroudings contestualize each other. While the task of filming is to document an action in space, editing is a creative exercise where to balance narrative, experience, imagination and possibility. Drawing from the everyday, I manipulate my realities so to reimagine them in new forms hoping to resolve the climate change inside me.
Video is a tool to sketch out ideas and study their potential; it is a “power tool” to record internal movements that I try to translate onto the moving of an image. An intimate exploration of the tension between harmonious and conflicting, private and public, to me, video making functions as a set of digital lips, tongue and vocal cords vibrating out rhythms of emotions that want to tune in with the movements all around me.
Breathing, eating, shaking, dancing, are expedients to synchronise with bodies outside mine and engage them both physically and conceptually. The ambition of these sketches is to connect to the extended body, through outdoor and indoor participatory situations of multichannel projections layered with installations, performance and other imaginative ways to vibrate together.
As I am seeking ways to free my creativity whilst accrediting my actions, the camera voices the gestures of a gender fluid, menopausal white woman artist, still attempting to validate her/their uncertain “becoming of her/their true potential, that wants and needs to be in harmony with nature and together with people no longer be forced to reason a patriarchal logic.
Through this lens, finally I get a glimpse of why my fundamental life processes, like my bodily functions and my “genderdoings”, are far from an expression of creatively being (in) a “body-environment”, but mere insignificant doings manifesting oppression instead of wellbeing. This phenomenon has amplified into a cosmic ripple affecting most beings and their relations to the environment; their/our bodies perpetuating an exhausting unsustainable system.
So I record my internal climate changes.
claudi Piripippi 