for only we can teach you how to die (?)

Video-art, 13’09”

The work is born out of the vision of a fragment of Is your daughter safe?: this film, directed by S. S. Millard in 1927, is an exploitation movie encompassing a certain amount of poetry and ambiguity. It features two naked girls in an Eden-like atmosphere, playing in a delicate sapphic relationship. We thought about the etymology of the word “exploitation” and of the corresponding Italian verb “s-fruttare”: to collect fruits until the point of exhaustion with the purpose of making profit. The work investigates images as fossilized testimonies in an hypothetic future where feminine and vegetal become one, united in the struggle against the phallo-anthropocentric desire for eternity and crystallization; to make of images a perpetually sellable fetish.

Researching survival, exploiting those fragmented images that arrive like an echo from the past, obsessively reproduced, deceptively reconstructed, giving birth to a hyper-nature, through the creation of new archetypical forms. A dystopic utopia of conservation inevitably connected to duration, in a continuous attempt to extend it beyond the limit.

Video directed and edited by Sabrina Bellenzier and Guenda Bondini

Video materials from the prelinger archive, 3d photogrammetry by Guenda Bondini

Texts, translated and transformed in sound poetry (performed by Sabrina Bellenzier), are extracted from “Letters from plants to humans” by Sanja Särman, published in in Cosmic Bulletin n. 1, Institute of the Cosmos, 2020