AiR Initiatives
Eva Giolo: Flowers blooming in our throats, A Tongue Called Mother and more
Wednesday, November 16
5-6 pm
Fogo Island Cinema
On Wednesday November 16, FIA hosted a screening of artist-in-residence Eva Giolo short films: Flowers blooming in our throats, A Tongue Called Mother, The Taste of Tangerines and The Demands of Ordinary Devotion at the Fogo Island Cinema from 5pm.
Eva Giolo is a Brussels-based artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work places particular focus on the female experience, employing experimental and documentary strategies to explore themes of intimacy, permanence and memory, along with the analysis of language and semiotics.
Her works have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries internationally, including Sadie Coles HQ, Harlan Levey Project, WIELS centre for Contemporary Art, MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Media City Film Festival, Viennale, FIDMarseille, Courtisane Film Festiva, Cinéma du Réel and Punto de Vista among others.
She is the recipient of a VAF Wildcard Prize (2016), the Cedric Willemen Award (2019) and special recognition from Vordemberge – Gildewart Foundation Award (2020). Her last film Flowers blooming in our throats had been nominated for The European film award and awarded the Top Prize at THIS IS SHORT 2021, a collaborative online event co-presented by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Vienna Short Film Festival, and other European organizations.
She is co-founder of the Moving Image Atelier (MIA) and Elephy, a production and distribution organization for film and media art, with Rebecca Jane Arthur, Chloë Delanghe, and Christina Stuhlberger.
Flowers blooming in our throats
IT, BE, 2020, 16mm, 8’37″
Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, Flowers blooming in our throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. The artist films a group of her friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. Giolo chooses to walk a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable. Hands try to support or escape, but also to grip or strike, in a subtle interweaving of sounds and references that adds to the viewer’s sense of tension and unease. A dialogue of gestures, made up of repeated visual sequences where time is marked by the spinning of a small toy top, as unstable and precarious as the balance of a relationship.The artist repeatedly uses a red filter on her lens, creating a conceptual device that relies on an element of abstraction to conceal and transfigure the image. The mechanical insertion of the filter over the lens thus becomes the simulation of a violent act, immediately changing the way we perceive and remember an action we have seen before.This coexistence of opposites can also be found in the title, which metaphorically suggests how the beauty of a natural phenomenon – and implicitly, love – can turn into a suffocating force. Leonardo Bigazzi
A Tongue Called Mother
BE, 2019, 16mm, 18’
A Tongue Called Mother depicts the relationship between language, gestures and affiliation. It slowly captures the actions and words of three generations of women in the same family and children learning to read, meditating on words learnt and forgotten through the body.
The Taste of Tangerines
JP, BE, 2019, 16mm, 10’34
The Taste of Tangerines paints the portrait of Yutakamachiocho a small island in the Seto Inland Sea in Japan. After ten years apart, a grandmother shares her memories of the island with her grandson. The film is both an account of the past and an impression of her daily life. Alternating word and image fragments the film slowly unfold and (re)constructs memories and stories. A search for the present and the past. An observation of that which produce a series of visual haiku.
The Demands of Ordinary Devotion
IT, BE, 2022, 16mm, 12’06″
A film constructed based on a game of chance and a collection of encounters in workshops and homes in the city of Rome. Although the protagonists never appear together, they are inextricably bound by their actions — meaning is conveyed through movement and its associated sound, slowly forming a visual exploration of physicality. The Demands of Ordinary Devotion invites a reflection on the process of making, the prospect of motherhood, and uncertainties in creation, balance and composition.