NUOVA
This project was partially inspired by the writings of Italian feminist Carla Lonzi of Rivolta Femminile. In her 1970 manifesto, “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” Lonzi declared: “Equality is what is offered as legal rights to colonized people. And what is imposed on them as culture.” She imagined a revolutionary transformation of human consciousness, social life and private life, in which woman is no longer defined in relation to man.
Drawing on Lonzi’s work as well as decades of feminist film theory, this project imagines an Italian science fiction film (“Nuova”) from 1972, and invents a documentary about it, presenting images and transcripts of an interview with the filmmaker and production stills from the film. Featuring a pregnant being recently arrived on Earth, the film’s narrative is shaped by the classic science fiction tropes of mysterious gestation, otherness, escape and arrival. The film’s creator conceives of a completely de-contextualized female protagonist as a political and feminist paradigm shift in both cinema and society.
Harnessing the performative potential of my (then-pregnant) body, I created production stills for the film shot on location in a desert. I have made production drawings and ceramic props for the film, which are presented as sculptural installations that evoke the metaphor of the vessel and the myth-making inherent in science fiction cosmologies. I am currently collaborating with a composer on a film score. Layers of the real and the imagined fold into each other, exposing the porous boundaries between self and spectator, maker and product.