WITH AN HELMET - fair and lost
A video by Francesca Fini (2012)
I’m wearing electrodes 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. 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: the deep conflict between a conscious behaviour and external social conditioning. Even crying is involuntary, caused by the black pencil and mascara entering my eyes since I cannot calibrate the movement of the hand. A mechanical cry that is automatically transmitted to the audience, in a sort of empathic conditioned connection, unconscious and therefore completely useless.
The performance is part of a larger project: withanhelmet.blogspot.it

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