From 2001 we work with different media such as photography, performance, video and installation exploring the concepts of history and memory and landscapes on the border between amnesia and cancellation, between reconstruction and repression “with a provocative approach always played on the thin border between irony and parody, between displacement and visual and semantic ‘detournement’ “.
As an artist duo, you question themes such as identity and sexuality. What new answers are there?
We were always attracted by postfeminist theories and the idea of queer and non duality sexual identities. We have tried to practice a situated gaze as performers of many of our works playing with irony with feminities representations. Also using mirror as a media of our work, it acts as an archetypal feminine device that recalls the female relationship with otherness, enfolding the figures of witch, shaman, and priestess.
We have no answers for our times but the feeling that people have found many new and more free ways of identifying their selves althought the slogan of Barbara Kruger’s artwork ‘Your body is a battleground’ is still so actual
At the festival you are representing mirror works. We’d love to hear more!
For the festival we produced a site specific Untiled Views mirrors, one nocturnal and one diurnal that dialogue together in relation to the magic atmosphere of Villa San Michele.
The Untitled Views are mirrors of different format on which are fixed photographs. The photos show combinations of coloured flares ignited in the studio. Once ignited, the flares produce different combinations of colours and clouds that we photograph within a few minutes before they disappear. The Untitled Views reproduce a natural environment artificially, an aerial landscape inside a studio thanks to a palette of colourful and toxic flares. There is an aesthetic of destruction underlying the research leading to the Untitled Views such as the urban protests, war zones, industrial pollution and the wildfires that transform into delicate landscapes, blazing sunsets, artificial Aurora Borealis, nocturnal moons that emerge from blue clouds. Moreover, the initials of Untitled Views evoke UV rays, of which the sun is one of the principal sources, and it is well known how it can be difficult or at times dangerous to look at the sun or an eclipse with the naked eye.
Photocredits: Serena Schettino