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FRANCESCA DA RIMINI
Los Días Y Las Noches De Los Muertos (the days and nights of the dead) 20 February to 22 March Adelaide-based Francesca da Rimini is a prolific artist who often works in collaboration with others internationally, particularly as she drifts through the internet, where she maintains a number of avatars and spaces including GashGirl, doll yoko, and The Realm of the Puppet Mistress. Francesca was a founding member (together with Julianne Pierce, Josephine Starrs and Virginia Barratt) in 1991 in Adelaide of the renown artists' collective VNS Matrix. She was awarded an Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship in 1999. Her works can be found at: http://sysx.org/gashgirl/ Los Dias y Las Noches de Los Muertos (the days and nights of the dead) is a web project - a ghost work of counter-memories, tracing thresholds of impossibilities beyond the blank gaze of pan-capitalism. This work mirrors and reconfigures a melange of contemporary cultural forms and military game plans including trash comics, hacktivist browser attacks, mailing list traceries, Rand Corporation research, graffiti and US Space Command vision papers. REVIEW Da Rimini's Days and Nights of the Dead was an installation of sound and projected visuals. A number of head phones were available at sitting points around a very large, low circular table. One heard through these a complexly layered sound montage: political invective, protest, impassioned appeals, expressions of sorrow, hope, anger. Filling the wall opposite was a projected, ever-changing mural made up of media reportage from around the world. This showed expressions of popular resistance to and critique of economic deprivation at the hands of the World Banks & global economic interests; Western imperial dominance and militarism; graffiti; symbols; headlines. The confrontation and struggle were both realistic in feel and mythically poetical, a matter of realpolitik Bataillean and Nietzschean epic trash comics, hactivist browser attack, military game-plans, exhortatory main-chance corporatist rhetoric, and Japanese manga. In many ways the work drew on and continued da Rimini's various manifestations in galleries & on websites as part of VNS Matrix, as GashGirl, doll yoko and in The Realm of the Puppet Mistress. Francesca da Rimini credited Ricardo Dominguez and the Zapatistas as an important inspiration. Hence the preponderance of latin imagery. The images were well chosen: dramatic, poignant, telling, their rotation working, in conjunction with the aural component, to great effect. A compilation of much of this imagery was available to take away in photocopied 'zine' form. Ken Bolton EVENTS Gallery talk Wednesday 5 March Zines made by the artist throughout the installation. Available free to public. PUBLICATION Colour catalogue, 420 x 148mm, with text by Ricardo Dominguez and collage of work by the artist. MEDIA Interviewed by Cath Kenneally for Radio Adelaide, Saturday 1 March 2003 Interviewed by Roman Orszanski for Radio 3D, Tuesday 25 February 2003 Interviewed DIY Arts - International Women's Day special - Radio 3CR Community Radio, Saturday 8 March 2003. Bob Briton "Los Dias y Las Noches de Los Muertos (the days and nights of the dead" The Guardian Newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia, 12 March 2003, page 2. James Strickland, "Culture Jamming" dB Magazine, 19 March 2003, page 45. Teri Hoskin "da Rimini and Tonkin: the viewer at work" RealTime No 54 April/May 2003, page 23. |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Lara Thompson |