Francesca Fini

The Apuleian Golden Donkey as a metaphor for popular wisdom, of that archive of vices and virtues of the common man that from the classical Roman culture was left to modern singers of our national spirit, from Boccaccio to Petrolini, and then Flaiano, Sordi and Gaber . The donkey proudly shows his feces as the common man who pursues only the satisfaction of the senses, which is happy of his crass ignorance.

FIVE ACTIONS WITH RED GLOVES is a work of mixed media on a 1.5 mt X 1.5 mt wooden board. The board was first decorated with scratches on a painted surface, while the female image was digitally painted using a videostill as a reference. The image was then printed on canvas and “sewn” on the board with thumbtacks and a complicated weaving of red woolen thread. The red wool also becomes graphic decoration, recalling the idea of the game while covering the nakedness of the figure. On the panel are also fixed the red latex gloves that are the cornerstone of the videoperformance inspired by the painting. The videoperformance is contained in the disc attached to the belly of the female figure.
The main concept of the work lies in this ongoing shift from analog to digital and back, like a needle going in and out while sewing a fabric.

The video contained in the disc which is embedded in the work, fixed on the belly of the female figure, is a dreamlike journey into the unco


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WITH AN HELMET - fair and lost. Live performance by Francesca Fini (2013)
This work is about the monstrosity of social conditioning. During the performance I'm wearing electrodes on both arms and I try to wear makeup. Involuntary muscle contractions caused by electric shock are very strong so that I cannot control the hands and the makeup spreads all over my face. "In a collapsing soul the hand doesn’t know that the head wants to be beautiful".
During the performance we hear the chorus of Nabucodonosor by Giuseppe Verdi, which has a very strong symbolic value in the history of my country, 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. Even crying is involuntary, caused by the black pencil and mascara entering my eyes since I cannot cali

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HUMANS (2012)
live media performance by Francesca Fini
dancers: Tiziana Cesarini, Claudia Comina
photography: Margerita Ferri, Federico Trimarchi
HUMANS is a video performance that reflects over the power of Image on the human psyche. Its power is represented theatrically by manipulating the body itself, which becomes the screen of an inner life distorted by the "Society of the Spectacle" as prefigured by Guy Debord.
The scene opens with two dancers who contemplate a faux Chinese aquarium, used as a metaphor for television, in its repetitive, trashy and unrealistic essence. A remote dominates the narration through the materialization of collective memory over the bodies of the dancers: real tv propaganda, soap-operas, newsreels from the last talk-show success. During the live video performance I intervene by drawing on the scene and over the bodies with my tablet. I draw with digital color but also with sound, because the movement of my hand on the ta




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LISZT
a video by Francesca Fini
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

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The protagonists of the performance are offered naked and vulnerable to the audience.
They wear working helmets as an ironic transposition of the legendary helmet of Scipio that, in this case, relates the rhetoric of the Roman glorious past, of which there remains not even the dust, with the unheard sufferings of the true heroes of everyday life in this country. They are the ones who live "with an helmet" and sometimes die with it, in factories and dockyards, while what is left of their stories is hastily hidden under the carpet of this diseased country. On their arms I place electrodes that cause strong involuntary muscle contractions forcing the workers to a grotesque dance that makes the flag moving on its own, to the beat of the national anthem. What is left in a dying country is just the mechanical and grotesque rhetoric of the national anthem and the respect demanded but devoid of any genuine feeling. A collective weariness and resignation that turns into hysteria when the
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The video is inspired in part to the so-called tragedy of Portopalo, which occurred in 1996 off the coast of Sicily. A sea cart full of immigrants was swallowed by the waters along with the 283 passengers. During the following days, those bodies ended up in the nets of the fishermen of Portopalo. Little by little they were hauled in like tuna and thrown back into the sea. The fishermen feared an investigation by the police, the seizure of their ships and the closing of the area to fishing. And so the town continued to pull in bodies and throw them back into the water, concealing the horrible secret that was revealed through the inquiries of a few zealous journalists.
In the video the details of that terrible event are only the point of departure of a personal journey in which there are no accusations and there are no theories. For this reason I chose a language very distant from that of a news item – a “performative”, strident language that recalls the epic of children's fables,
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This is a performance experiment blending togheter body-art and interaction design. The purpose of the performance is to transport the audience in an immersive dimension in which the performer becomes the vehicle of an experience of color through interactive sound. 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".

A man and a woman are telling their story, made of love and anger, passion and indifference, a story that culminates in the symbolic exchange of food, milk, bondage and fight. Will they ever find a way to understand each other? To overcome fear and violence? The mind is always present but the flames is burning too fast.

The meat is a conductor of entire worlds with whom we seek some form of dialogue, of negotiation. I tell this short-circuit, the magic of touch and recognition of the presence of the others, and of something elusive but undeniable, through interaction design. I have a low-voltage electrode in the arm. The other pole is attached to the foil that covers the table. When I touch the flesh, this is a conductor and the circuit closes, sending a signal to a digital synthesizer that translates it into sound. Nothing can help us in this journey of discovery, where we have to venture drained and free, even if you exorcise your trip on a table supported by piles of books.

"To be or not to be?" The question is made by remixing the words of Sir Laurence Olivier in his Hamlet.

In the performance the most vulgar tools at the base of interaction design and digital entertainment are incorporated within a traditional aesthetic vision that gives them absolutely new and unifying meaning.
Technically the performance was designed to use a webcam connected to a real-time software that tracks my movements by associating them with sounds and turning my body into a synthesizer. At the same time my image, projected live on screen behind me, interacts with 3D graphics in order to obtain a kind of augmented reality. The concept behind the performance is the desire of melting togheter two very distant languages: Shakespeare and a video game. So, the onanism of playstation becomes public spectacle, while the aesthetics of ritual theater decomposes in the psychedelia of a videogame.
Finalist at Laguna Arte Laguna 2010

The rabbit got out of the cylinder to show us the banality of evil. It tells us a story in three acts about the origin of power, playing with colored paper cut-out shapes.
The performance is based on interaction design and video mapping. The sounds are generated live, according to the color of all the paper objects that are shown to the camera, which frames the white belly of the rabbit. Each color is associated with a sound that is emitted and modulated by the synthesizer, according to the movement of the hands. The colors, once "activated", also launch graphic animations, which are projected on the white rabbit mask suspended in the air.

The rabbit got out of the cylinder to show us the banality of evil. It tells us a story in three acts about the origin of power, playing with colored paper cut-out shapes.
The performance is based on interaction design and video mapping. The sounds are generated live, according to the color of all the paper objects that are shown to the camera, which frames the white belly of the rabbit. Each color is associated with a sound that is emitted and modulated by the synthesizer, according to the movement of the hands. The colors, once "activated", also launch graphic animations, which are projected on the white rabbit mask suspended in the air.

This is the "live performance" version of my videoart "THE MIRROR/DORIAN GRAY". On stage there is an holographic mirrored screen where I watch myself till my secret double appears as a rear projection. "Narcissus" myth, reinterpreted by a performance that “reflects” the magmatic disintegration of individual identity in contemporary society and, as a women, the brutality of the search for artificial beauty. Surgery, blood and decostruction of identity are the main topics of this performance.

"Cry Me" is a radiography of the soul.
As a woman, I reveal myself through videoart, playing with a tv display that is like an uterus where my secret “avatar” lives and sings.
The video was inspired somehow by the visceral and visionary paintings of Frida Kahlo.
The artwork in the display was originally a video shot with a dv camera and then manipulated into photoshop frame-by-frame, as a digitally painted animation.

Performance Art with video and contemporary dance, dealing with the theme of water and protection of vegetal life. I arrive in a secret garden with my little mission to accomplish: to plant a little tree. There are many creatures around me: creatures of fire, stone and wind. And I turn myself into a tree by opening the hydraulic circuit of my suit that start dripping green liquid tears all over me.

A woman discovers and plays with a disco mirrorball, and so she dies, mesmerized by her own image reflected by hundreds of little pieces of mirror. "Narcissus" myth, reinterpreted by a video that “reflects” the magmatic disintegration of individual identity in contemporary society.

"Cry Me" is a radiography of the soul.
During the performance, I reveal myself through videoart, playing with a tv display where my secret “avatar” lives and sings.
The video was inspired somehow by the visceral and visionary paintings of Frida Kahlo.
The artwork in the display was originally a video shot with a dv camera and then manipulated into photoshop frame-by-frame, as a digitally painted animation.

the sweet and sour love story of a man nad his inflatable doll

This is the second video of the cycle "With an Helmet".
In this second video I'm wearing the electrodes on both arms and I try to wear makeup. Involuntary contractions caused by electrical impulse are very strong and the makeup spreads all over my face, uncontrollably, turning me into a monster. In the background we hear the chorus of Nabucodonosor by Giuseppe Verdi, which has a very strong symbolic value in the history of my country, bringing along the ghosts of old struggles for freedom that no one remembers anymore. "My country, fair and lost". Even crying is involuntary, caused by the black pencil and mascara entering the eyes because I cannot calibrate the movement of the hand. A mechanic cry that, through those close details of my eyes, it is automatically transmitted to those who watch the video, in a sort of empathic conditioned connection, unconscious and therefore completely useless.
The video is one of the episodes of a larger project, open and traveling, that w

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FIVE ACTIONS WITH RED GLOVES is a work of mixed media on a 1.5 mt X 1.5 mt wooden board. The board was first decorated with scratches on a painted surface, while the female image was digitally painted using a videostill as a reference. The image was then printed on canvas and “sewn” on the board with thumbtacks and a complicated weaving of red woolen thread. The red wool also becomes graphic decoration, recalling the idea of the game while covering the nakedness of the figure. On the panel are also fixed the red latex gloves that are the cornerstone of the videoperformance inspired by the painting. The videoperformance is contained in the disc attached to the belly of the female figure.
The main concept of the work lies in this ongoing shift from analog to digital and back, like a needle going in and out while sewing a fabric.
The video contained in the disc which is embedded in the work, fixed on the belly of the female figure, is a dreamlike journey into the unconscious

..

WITH AN HELMET (con un casco), 2012
Una performance di Francesca Fini
MACRO La Pelanda, 15 novembre 2012, Premio Adrenalina.
Con Giulio Bianchini, Roberto Bolino, Andrea Brunitto, Davide Cortese, Francesco Cinelli, Chiara Giannini Guazzugli, Kristine FauxPas, Francesca Fini, Martino Fiorentini, Paola Mineo, Maria Manuela Pochetti, Luca Tarantelli.
Alla tromba Jurek Weitzen Kralkowski.
Contributi video Flavio Parente e Federico Trimarchi.

The protagonists of the performance are offered naked and vulnerable to the audience.
They wear working helmets as an ironic transposition of the legendary helmet of Scipio that, in this case, relates the rhetoric of the Roman glorious past, of which there remains not even the dust, with the unheard sufferings of the true heroes of everyday life in this country. They are the ones who live "with an helmet" and sometimes die with it, in factories and dockyards, while what is left of their stories is







..

a video by Francesca Fini

wombs

HUMANS
live media performance by Francesca Fini
dancers: Tiziana Cesarini, Claudia Comina
photography: Margerita Ferri, Federico Trimarchi

HUMANS is a video performance that reflects over the power of Image on the human psyche. Its power is represented theatrically by manipulating the body itself, which becomes the screen of an inner life distorted by the "Society of the Spectacle" as prefigured by Guy Debord.
The scene opens with two dancers who contemplate a faux Chinese aquarium, used as a metaphor for television, in its repetitive, trashy and unrealistic essence. A remote dominates the narration through the materialization of collective memory over the bodies of the dancers: real tv propaganda, soap-operas, newsreels from the last talk-show success. During the live video performance I intervene by drawing on the scene and over the bodies with my tablet. I draw with digital color but also with sound, because the movement of my hand on the ta





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30 COINS (2012)
video & art by Francesca Fini
photography by Federico Trimarchi

For "LowLives:occupy!", march 2012
performance art streaming event
partners: Occupy with Art / Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics New York/ Low Lives

I don't hate money, I love money. As an artist I need money to make my projects come true, I need them to buy tools, materials, to materialize my ideas. My creativity is conditioned by money. It's the deepest slavery of all, when the only freedom you have (creating) it is not possible without money. Artists are not free at all. Money becomes then an obsession. I Love and hate money at the same time, because I depend on them to live my inner life.
This is how society works today. Primitive, imperfect, corrupted in any possible way. We are all imprisoned in this matrix. Things are going to change and eventually men will be free from money, but as long as we have a little note in our h








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A video on the obsessive manipulation of my own image, which becomes a metaphor for the general confusion between real and virtual of the "Société du spectacle" prefigured by Guy Debord. The digital culture and its tools become a self-destructive virus. I could work on the face of Osama Bin Laden, but the fake photo-montage spread by the media as proof of his death is already an unattainable work of art . I then brought the concept within myself, in the heart of my "feminine" self-destructiveness, where the pen of the tablet becomes an "augmented" surgical scalpel deep into the void.

digitally painted still frames from video
20 stills from my video "parnasus" (http://vimeo.com/33705372) are being re-painted manually with a graphic tablet and digital painting software. The images in their original widescreen format (70cmX40cm) will be printed on fine art quality paper
The video the stills are taken from was shot in "Cine Ars", the famous laboratory in Cinecittà Film Studios in Rome. The lab is managed by a family that from generations creates props and scenographies for movies. But the growing use of CGI in movies are putting their work in danger, narrowing their field of action and transforming their work in modern archeology.
So I thought to treat the fake statues as 3d graphics, cutting them out from the video frame, rigging them with a 3d skeleton, animating them and re-inserting them in the video.
The hand-made Analogic fake-but-real becomes even more fake, while recycling itself to survive the Digital Age.

digitally painted still frames from video
20 stills from my video "parnasus" (http://vimeo.com/33705372) are being re-painted manually with a graphic tablet and digital painting software. The images in their original widescreen format (70cmX40cm) will be printed on fine art quality paper

The video the stills are taken from was shot in "Cine Ars", the famous laboratory in Cinecittà Film Studios in Rome. The lab is managed by a family that from generations creates props and scenographies for movies. But the growing use of CGI in movies are putting their work in danger, narrowing their field of action and transforming their work in modern archeology.
So I thought to treat the fake statues as 3d graphics, cutting them out from the video frame, rigging them with a 3d skeleton, animating them and re-inserting them in the video.
The hand-made Analogic fake-but-real becomes even more fake, while recycling itself to survive the Digital Age.

Parnasus is a video that tells a dream. And like all dreams, it comes from a small image nested in the mind. The image is a marble statue white as snow. I've never been driven by the fantasy of Winckelmann that still subdues our imagination. All that white marble disorients me. I feel lost, I need color spots as if they were signs in a map. A misunderstanding, that of Winckelmann, that becomes the metaphor for an even deeper and more dangerous mistake: the illusion that the past, crystallized into a kind of noble and abstract projection, it is always better than us, it is always perfect.
So in my dream I return to the statues the color denied. The color erased by the passage of time as you cancel the losers of history and forget the evils of the world. I return the blood to the ancient statues, and the ferocity and the violence that always pervade human history, in an infinite loop of death and delusion.
An absolute and unbearable violence that with their unreal perfection

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The video is inspired in part to the so-called tragedy of Portopalo, which occurred in 1996 off the coast of Sicily. A sea cart full of immigrants was swallowed by the waters along with the 283 passengers. During the following days, those bodies ended up in the nets of the fishermen of Portopalo. Little by little they were hauled in like tuna and thrown back into the sea. The fishermen feared an investigation by the police, the seizure of their ships and the closing of the area to fishing. And so the town continued to pull in bodies and throw them back into the water, concealing the horrible secret that was revealed through the inquiries of a few zealous journalists.

written, directed and performed by Francesca Fini
music Gianluca Giardi
camera Federico Trimarchi

ALONE IN THE DARK
a performance experiment
by Francesca Fini

website of the project:
http://aloneinthedark10.blogspot.com/

Self Portrait is a piece of live art by Francesca Fini, implemented in collaboration with Gianluca Giardi, visual artist of Rome. A black cloth is in the middle of the performance space. On the canvas runs a video that contains a mosaic of images of women in the 60s public domain. The "ephemeral" culture that reveals the stereotype of women and its distortion in the period surrounding the so-called image-obsessed society. She is and advertising vehicle, a messenger of social campaigns, the object of male desire in the first soft-porns in black and white. A picture that could be monotonous, but in reality is mysterious and ineffable, while the video runs, sent back and forth by the fast fingers of Francesca Fini handling a corset full of electronic valves and knobs. An electronic dress/prison that is also an instrument that makes up a noisy soundscape where you lose the words of those women of the past, while Gianluca tries to keep their faces on the canvas with white chalk.

performance art by Francesca Fini, with live interactively generated music and visuals. Remixing youtube shakesperean stars and Sir Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, act 3, scene 1 soliloquy

digital manipulation of stills from my video LATIN LOVER. Selected for the 55° edition of Premio Termoli.

Duchamp spinning glass, like the famous Duchamp optical machinery, is a visual project that lives in the deconstruction of reality (represented here by a normal piece of footage), made out of shapes, lines and borders, to create another world of pure color, motion and energy.
video By Francesca Fini
music "Duchamp" by Isuzu Kochiwa

Study for a series of live performances based on the idea of action painting with light. The effect is created putting a camera in front of the scene and reprojecting the live action on the holographic semitransparent screen in front of me, after having processed it in the computer, adding a very strong motion blur effect. All the graphics in the video are created with a simple light torch that I hold in my hand and move aeround. It's litteraly a live painting made of light. I even paint with my own face and body, cutted out from the dark by light.

The piece was performed late at night, in Tor Bella Monaca, a very depressed neighborhood in Rome, Italy. In all that desolation and dirt, I'm a crazy lady trying to reach my little spot of peace and warmt. And even if I'm finally resting under the orange lights of an artificial sun, I'm still all alone in the dark. Because in every desert there is a little oasis and in every oasis a little desert.
written and directed by Francesca Fini
music by Marco Raaphorst

Portrait of the famous Italian transexual and activist Vladimir Luxuria, as a pop divinity. Entirely created in digital painting.

dedicated to my fobia for butterflies. This strange fear is linked to the fear for change and growth. The fear for the natural course of life and death, that is narrated by the perfect geometry of insects.

"killer doll" belongs to the serie "DOLL STORY" in which I depict the imaginary life of an inflatable doll, eternally in conflict between a desire for beauty and submission to a master and bloody rebellion.

dedicated to my fobia for butterflies. This strange fear is linked to the fear for change and growth. The fear for the natural course of life and death, that is narrated by the perfect geometry of insects.

"self- portait with sex doll" belongs to the serie "DOLL STORY" in which I depict the imaginary life of an inflatable doll, eternally in conflict between a desire for beauty and submission to a master and bloody rebellion.