The Italian artist Francesca Fini will be showing in our next exhibition three video works. Francesca is an interdisciplinary artist mainly focusing on new media and interactive media, video and performance art. Her live projects, always addressing social and political issues, are mixed with lo-fi technology, homemade interaction design devices, live audio and video. Primarily interested in video and live art, she also creates artworks assembling performance art ‘relics’ or manipulating video stills.
The video Fair and Lost (2013) is based on a live performance by Francesca Fini. During the performance Francesca is wearing electrodes on both arms and is trying to wear makeup. Involuntary muscle contractions caused by electric shock are very strong so that she cannot control the hands and the makeup spreads all over her face.
We hear the chorus of Nabucodonosor by Giuseppe Verdi, which has a very strong symbolic value in the history of her country (Italy), bringing along the ghosts of old struggles for freedom that no one remembers anymore. “My country, fair and lost”. The hysterical, uncontrollable, movement of the hand represents the disease of social habit, which reveals its fragility when the system appears on the point of collapsing: the deep conflict between a conscious behaviour and external social conditioning.
Even crying is involuntary, caused by the black pencil and mascara entering her eyes since she cannot calibrate the movement of the hand. A mechanical cry that is automatically transmitted to the audience, in a sort of empathic conditioned connection, unconscious and therefore completely useless.
