International Competition

White and Black Grafts

Federica Foglia / Canada, Italy / 2022 / 7’ / Silent


“Grafting”, the act of placing a portion of one plant into a stem, root, or branch of another, so that a union will be formed and the partners will continue to grow.
Following a similar approach, several 8mm and 16mm home movies (c1930s – c1970s) are assembled into a hand-made collage reflecting on the personal and cultural process of “becoming” a woman. The original found footage, mainly portraying women intent in their domestic lives, has been collected obsessively from eBay auctions, then remediated through a number of artisanal techniques: celluloid decay in soil and water, emulsion scratching, painting on film, digital manipulation and finally, emulsion lifting. The latter by soaking the film in a bath, slowly removing the image from its base, and placing it on another, a celluloid graft. Troubling these images acts as a visceral intervention in which the personal lived experience of the filmmaker is interwound with the iconography of womanhood in the collected home movies, relying on eBay as an invaluable repository to counter the official archives.

Editing Federica Foglia
Archive research Federica Foglia

Federica Foglia

Federica Foglia is a transnational visual artist. She holds a BA in Multimedia Languages and Digital Computing for Humanities: History of Art, Theatre, and Cinema from the University of Naples L’Orientale, an MFA in Film from York University, Toronto and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Arts at York University (Toronto). She is interested in issues of migration, citizenship and identity, displacement, women of the diaspora, migrant temporalities, and finding a visual language to investigate these experiences. Her practice revolves around recycled cinema, amateur filmmaking, imaginary archives and tactile cinema. Her works have been exhibited and won awards in several art galleries and film festivals, among which Toronto International Film Festival, EX-iS Seoul, Antimatter, Images Festival, Crossroads San Francisco.

may 4
4:00 pm.
Cinema Intrastevere
movie theater 1

Repetition screening may 5
10:00 pm.
Cinema Intrastevere
movie theater 1
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