Fini Francesca – Cyland Video Archive

Skinned

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:28:15 +0000

A Dadaist collage that plays on the concept of identity, elaborated through impossible selfies taken by the protagonists of famous masterpieces in the history of portraiture and self-portrait.

These portraits come alive, piercing the boundaries of their temporal and cultural definition. Then suddenly they grab a smartphone, they call and maybe wait, the eternal expectation of those who meet a call center.

Contemporary everyday life insinuates itself, alienating and alienated, within the lyrical, utopian, and idealized world of a portrait.

What do you hide under your skin, flayed by the toxic radiation of mobile phones? What would Leonardo da Vinci or Andy Warhol have done with this evil device?

image_skinned_3

image_skinned_2

image_skinned_q

The post Skinned appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

(S)Confinamento

Darya Cherkashina — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 23:18:21 +0000

/S)CONFINAMENTO – first chapter / hic sunt leones

Networked digital performance for live webcam & synth

The Italian *piazzas* are framed by a webcam system that broadcasts online the flow of their chaotic life. A cold, indifferent look, in the sun or in the rain, which does not change in the midst of changes. Those squares are now deserted, while life in quarantine is hidden invisibly inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. The webcams today collect the testimony of a surreal event. All the life, once feverish, becomes now a fleeting and ephemeral circumstance: the squares are manned by police vans, enlivened here and there, by the flight of a seagull, by a flag in the wind, by a runner’s bicycle, by a masked couple walking a dog. In the silent void, these short passing lives, these lonely adventures of the confined city, are narrative elements of a dystopian story, which I spy and pursue avidly as if I were at the window of one of those buildings. Through motion tracking technology, I steal the webcam signal and feed it to a software that I created for this project, which records and tracks visually the movement of people, vehicles, objects, and animals, transforming the data flow in a concert for synthesizer: the smallest movement produces a sound, a modulation, a graphic visualization, a digital effect. Finally, I return everything to the network, through live streaming on Facebook, in a creative ring of manipulations and interpretations in real-time – an open semantic loop that ideally gives a voice to the mute explorers of the locked city.

video of the live performance – https://vimeo.com/404843767

website of the project – https://sconfinamento.tumblr.com/

Francesca Fini (Italy), _S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter, 2020 (2) (converted) (1)

Francesca Fini (Italy), _S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter, 2020 (1) (converted)

Francesca Fini (Italy), _S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter, 2020 (2) (converted)

The post (S)Confinamento appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

White Noise

Darya Cherkashina — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 23:06:39 +0000

Francesca Fini, drawing from ancient mythology, creates a modernized image of the Parcae (Goddesses of Fate) and Themis (Goddess of Justice), engaging us in the process of analyzing global historical experience. A woman in front of the screen spins a red thread from 1960s television broadcasts: fragments of propaganda films, commercials, nuclear tests, and the confrontation between the two superpowers on Earth and in space. The artist encapsulates the contradictions that emerged in the world after World War II and the Cold War, the Vietnam War—marked by the struggle for civil rights and the hysteria of terror.

Francesca Fini whitenoise

Francesca Fini whitenoise2

The post White Noise appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

Liszt

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:05:55 +0000

It is the beginning of the 20th century and three children are posing for a family photo. The children are young pioneers in a colony of Christian immigrants in Jerusalem. The subsequent intervention of the photographer has added to their bewildered faces the false colors of the photos of the period; a combination of chromatic shades with the odor of cookies and hot milk, porcelain dolls, long sea journeys, dusty old books, and an artificial “innocence”. This is the point of departure for a digital transformation in which the lower part of my face replaces that of the children, in a reversal of time and meaning crystalized in a non-time and non-meaning, as a different kind of story comes to light which, superimposing itself on the peculiar circumstances in which the photo was taken, looks for its metaphorical significance. In this way the three children become three human archetypes imprisoned in the eternal pillory of a family photo.

It is a forced communion that translates into reciprocal impatience and an increasing verbal violence that superimposes itself on the words, preventing any kind of interaction. The sense of incommunicableness is obtained by juxtaposing fragments of phrases found on the Internet, in a mash-up that unravels into a contemporary senseless dialogue that reveals how a word not listened to is, consciously or not, violence in its pure state. And therefore the universe concealed in this photo, the epic of human dreams and illusions, in the family album of the search for a lost innocence by these ancient pioneers, is translated into a form of violence that throughout history has brought extreme consequences. When there is only the word, one’s own, the mouth becomes a weapon. Nonetheless, the invitation to listen is recuperated in the end, in a sort of message of hope that I consign to the world through these three unknowing ancestors.

Francesca Fini LISZT1

Francesca Fini LISZT2

Francesca Fini LISZT3

Francesca Fini LISZT4

The post Liszt appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.