Francesca Fini
My work on the body
from kinesthesia
to synesthesia
I am a performance artist. I am intimately. I am performance artist when I create videos, because in my videos the presence of the body in action is almost essential. In video performance there is a body that acts in space and time, in a sort of cinematic reworking of a piece of live art, or the image is crushed in formal abstraction and bright explosion of color. The body becomes pure energy, because those spots of bright color (see "Duchamp spinning glass" and "God is a green triangle") still arise from the electronic manipulation of the image of the body in action.
The body acting in space and time is what guides me to essential knowledge and to the final kinesthetic representation of my inner world. Maybe this is the most primitive and primary mode of knowledge and representation, but it is also the only one I know and where I feel comfortable.
I repeat: I am a performance artist. I am intimately.
My performances, especially those in which I use interaction design tools (webcams, sensors and electrodes), arise from an attempt to create a significant dialogue between the body in action and its virtual nemesis, which is a living material made of dynamic images and sounds. I would say that maybe this is the obvious characteristic of my work on the body, which is expressed in the boundary where the kinesthesia becomes synesthesia.
The video and sounds are my alter ego. They look for an interaction with my body, in a real time exchange that takes place through the manipulation of sensors that turn the color into sound, the intensity of light into geometric shapes, the movement of the body into verbal flow (see "Blind", "Western Meat Market," "The Shadow").
At the heart of this sensual catharsis there is me, in my solemn truth of being a human female who expresses her essence. Nothing more and nothing less. Sometimes I wear a mask to protect myself from the unbearable intensity of the action (see "Blood"); sometimes I'm completely naked. Pure human essence. Once an art critic called me "witch Circe"*, talking about my performance, "Western Meat Market". I find much truth in the pleasant irony of this definition, when a woman who expresses herself by manipulating technological tools, traditionally male prerogative, is still considered a witch.
Am I a witch? I move into a dreamscape populated by ghosts, as if it were my house, evoking and awakening my inner monsters with strange cyberpunk rituals. In "Blind" for example, I transport the audience in an immersive dimension in which the performer becomes the vehicle of an experience of color through interactive sound and visuals. While I paint my face like an ancient warrior, the webcam is programmed in order to recognize the special "wave" emitted by the color and the synth to respond live by activating a sound. To each of the 4 main colors I associated a group of instruments with a well-defined personality; to yellow the madness of the violin, to red the deep notes of the piano, to blue the metaphysics of crystal bells, to green a bunch of acid tones mixed with the hum of the forest. The scientific research on the relationship between sound and color is the starting point of a personal experience in which I discover the connections between the senses. "To smell the yellow, to hear its music, to keep it between the fingers".
I like the essence of primitive raw image, the savagery of the naked body free to express, the wild mixed color, body fluids, blood, and the meeting of all this with technology is what creates my performative work. And in my videos, these elements are creatively reworked, as in small films where my performances are enhanced by macro inserts, 3D graphics, and completely new optical angles.
* The Witch Circe in mythology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circe)