XTRA Interview: FRANCESCA DA REMINI "All women are Ghosts" . Francesca da Remini talks about two of her recent projects.

FDR the project which I made in 1997 98 was called DOLL SPACE and it is a very hypertext environment on the Web it is about 700 pages and with a 30 minute soundtrack and many animations and graphics. And DOLLSPACE is a world of ghosts and it arose from a time that I spent in Kyoto in Japan and I was staying in a little rice paper hut in the mountains and the local people showed me a pond or a small lake and this is were for centuries women used to drown their baby daughters because there had been a practise of female infanticide in Japan. Just has there has been and is still in many other parts of the world. And I found that a very haunting and disturbing image that for so many centuries the local women had come to this particular place were I was staying and had to kill the daughters that they had just given birth to because they were female and not male. And um... I wasn't doing anything in Kyoto I wasn't there for art reasons I was just there really to have a holiday so I had a lot of spaciousness in my imagination. During that period a character came to me called DOLL YOKO and she was a little ghost girl and she was really I guess the embodiment for me of all the little girls who had drowned in this pond. And at the time I was having an email dialogue with an activist, a Mexican activist in New York RICARDO DOMINGUEZ and the voice of DOLL YOKO began to speak to him. It was a small voice and very sweet and very melancholic and through this exchange like many of my other characters um... it became DOLL YOKO seemed to take on a life and a voice of her own. And RICARDO DOMINGUEZ the activist suggested to me that I build a pond in cyberspace, on the Internet for DOLL YOKO and all the other little ghost girls to inhabit. To cut a long story short that is what I did. I had a couple of residencies in Adelaide and in London and I learnt how to write the HTML code which is the language behind web pages and how to use software which I'd used a little bit during VNS MATRIX. But in the MATRIX I mainly wrote and this was much more about making a multimedia environment of the big drifting space of DOLL YOKO. It was only going to be a fairly small website of about 100 pages but I found that the more I fell into that pond of dead girls the more stories and characters suggested themselves. And also it was a way to weave in some of the research I had done on the virtual communities about female sexuality violence power dysfunctional families, imaginative relationships gender fucking and so on. So the pond of dead girls ended up being a home for different ghosts different traces of ideas. So that was an interesting real world theoretical and social real world social counterpoint to the imaginary characters that were coming up out of my pond of dead girls. Also in DOLL SPACE I included quite a lot of emails from friends and wove them into the narrative because I find email a really interesting medium a kind of minor literature at times. And I always think it is a shame that when someone sends you an email basically you are the only person who reads it where as if you can rework it into a narrative it becomes a communication that can be shared with many people. And also the core text of DOLL SPACE is quite a short poem and that was in part the crystallisation of many months of email dialogue with a couple of people. Q: did you have response from the people in Kyoto? FDR No response from the people directly in Kyoto but I have made contact with various Japanese artists and writers who have enjoyed the character of DOLL YOKO and who feel that she speaks something to them as well. And also through out DOLL SPACE there are a lot of images taken from pornography that I found in Japan that you could buy just as in the corner shop where you buy your milk and you buy a little 5 dollar magazine and often of very young girls... girls who look like they are only maybe 12 or 16 so I was working with those kinds of images and they became another kind of manifestation of DOLL YOKO the infantilised sexualised um... young Asian female. Who also embodies some of the complexity I feel about pornography and how much it is enjoyable and how much it is problematic when it is involving younger people. Q. Did you get DOLL YOKO feed back from JAPANESE Feminists? FDR Yeah I haven't really met as far as I can tell from only short times in Japan, there is not a really big Feminist movement there But I've met Japanese artists who are dealing with sexuality and gender and had positive responses to the project. I think DOLL YOKO is interesting because she is a ghost and she says: All women are ghosts and should rightly be feared, and: All history is pornography, Laws are made by men who fuck their daughters. So she's a wise and not exactly cynical ghost but embodies both I mean paradoxically carries both the innocence of a child's view of the world with a very old way of looking at power relationships. But because she's a ghost she can slip through worlds she can manifest in different ways um... she can initiate a series of hauntings that might be people's own experiences that have haunted them or looking at the haunted spectres of power you know in our current world... she operates in both the small world of the family and what happens with the power relationships within family and misuse of power and then within a much wider social context. Q: So it originated in Kyoto but has a much larger cultural life? FDR Yeah the origins were definitely from Kyoto from staying by this pond of dead girls but what DOLL YOKO explores I think is the world of power from the perspective of someone who was born female and who has grown up in a female body and has had experiences that are directly linked to being inhabiting a female body. So her commentary on the family on love relationships on war on technology and equity come from this experience of being a socialised female. But not necess... all to do then with just staying in Japan it's looking at yeah at the industrial yeah the post industrial world And Fourth world first world relations as well. Q: DOLL YOKO says all women are ghosts and should be feared...can you talk about that? FDR When DOLL YOKO says all women are ghosts and should rightly be feared I think I'm referring to ... an I don't know because lines come up out of you and you don't always know where they are coming from and why they are coming... but to me it suggests that because in most societies for at least for the last 3000 years women have been dis-empowered they haven't held the social control of the societies or the communities that they have been inhabiting even of they have had control within the family So they're ghosts socially they are invisible I mean we just have to look at whose in politics at the moment how many women do you see how many women do you see how women are represented in the media etc. etc you know compared to men women are invisible and they're dis-empowered and they're disenfranchised and therefore they are dangerous and therefore you are wise to recognise this and you are wise to fear them. Because people who have been denied power are dangerous because at one point they are going to come to the point that the where they are going to say basta, enough is enough we are no longer going to live on our knees. And they will fight to take back that which has been taken from them.

FDR. One project that I've been involved with for the last two years is called IDENTITY RUNNERS and it was conceived of by a New York artist DIANNE LUDEN and she invited me and an Italian activist writer filmmaker to play with her. And we had three characters. My character was LIQUID NATION and she is really a critique of the globalisation of power, another character is DISCORDIA and she's coming out of the debris of post hallucinogenic society and DIANNE'S character EPHEMERA is tracing her research that she is doing into bioethics biotechnology and also the labour conditions of particularly women working in assembling computers say in sweatshops around the world. Yeah so these are very loose frameworks for characters and we've got a very open source project so we're creating websites and we are also doing web based performances and everything that we're writing we're uploading to a common database. So I might make an animation or a series of texts and then the other two characters can download those mutate them upload them to the database and the whole body of work is getting larger and larger but it is completely open source and at different moments we invite people to come in and play with us software developers, musicians 3D animators. So we've been doing a few performances in some club environments in New York and Sydney and Rome also we did one performance in Montreal were none of us were present but we sent all of the material and the instructions for a video live mix and we actually logged in through IRC and did an hour long improvisation from drawing material form the text databases. So I think that is an interesting example of how the new technologies um... cut across three people being separated you know incredible geographic distances. We don't have much money for this project, we like to work bilingually or in three languages depending on who is coming to play with us and none of us own any of the material that is all anti-copyright and open source um. I mean for me that is an interesting project and I thought after VNS MATRIX I wouldn't become involved again with a collective because it takes up a lot of energy maintaining the collective whether it is an art collective or a cyberfeminist collective but this is quite organic so it is a fun place a fun new digital sand pit to play in ....

Transcodeur express Le 25.04.02 ˆ 00 h 00

ARTE présente "Neue Kraft, Neues Werk (Transcodeur Express)" : Un documentaire de Ninon Liotet et Olivier Schulbaum. Durée : 49 Minutes avec: Shu Lea Cheang, Electric Indigo, Jenny Holzer, Chris Korda, Netochka Nezvanova, Sadie Plant, Francesca da Rimini, Terre Theamlitz...

"Neue Kraft, Neues Werk (Transcodeur Express)"présente des artistes visuels, des musiciennes, des théoriciennes à l'ère des technologies digitales. A travers leurs approches engagées, féministes et queer, elles déconstruisent les stereotypes et les héritages culturels des relations entre l'homme et la machine, en ouvre le debat sur les technologies à de nouvelles perspectives.