Elysa/interview
OCTOBER 02 2019
EDITED VERSION OF CHEN INTERVIEWING ME
What are you making? Eye project! No concrete idea yet? There are a few aspects I want to combine: Horror/scary elements, feminism, the concept ofg time. Reference film: Get out. In this film the racism itself is the horror of the story. I think it could be interesting to see if I could make something in which the sexism/misoginy is the horror. For women sexism can really feel like a disturbance in their being*. It expects from them, and it limits them. I want to see if I can (visually) express this disturbance in being through doing something visual with time.
*I see "being" and "time" as very connected. And because women's "being" is constantly disturbed by sexism/etc., you could say that women live a much looser narrative(?)
Why are you making it? The personal motivation becoming the feminist: The disconnection I've always felt with my assigned gender. From a young age I noticed that in this society my gender meant limitation, and it had certain expectations that I felt uncomfortable with. Reference book: The Second Sex by De Beauvoir. She wrote that research shows that most girls at the age of about 11 years old feel sorry that they're not a boy. I very much identify with that; I too had that feeling at that age. The thing I find so interesting about horror is the mystery; the ungraspable element. I think I feel the same way about time. The mystery motivates me, and I feel like I want to grasp the ungraspable. In a way, I feel like my assigned gender is a horror. I think it's very dramatic and maybe even tragic (old Greek definition!) to be a woman in this world? I think the film Teeth also ties into that.
How does it relate to other things you have done? Concept, ideology (the feminism/vulnerability/concept of time) that is connected with my previous work. Working from strong feelings and emotions. Concept comes before the image forming.
How is it different to other things you have done? New of moving images(new media) Horror images. In the past I've made images that have felt tense, but never something that might be actually (existentially) frightning. So I'm basing my horror images on tense images that I've done before, but it's also very new to me. During my bachelor I gave a lot of thought about the information I wanted to pass on with my photos; what do they depict? Now I want to focus more on the medium. What could the medium do for translating feelings to the viewer.
What are the most significant choices have you made recently? Working with new elements: horror. I'm also pursuing this interest just for the sake of it. At least it started out that way. I wanted to pursue it just because, and then I made it fit my concept.
STEVE INTERVIEWING ME
I find this a very difficult question. I want to get a PhD and work towards toward that. I feel I’m somewhere between practice based and theoretical. Previously I did a thesis about the concept of time in contemporary photography, this involved some primary research [interviews &c.]. [S: So you know your way around citation systems &c.?] The thesis was very academic. I’m fine with that kind of writing but I also like speculative writing. I would pick a topic and read about it and pick a few theories that I find interesting and link them to each other. I once looked at the work of the photographer Nan Golding and read it through Susan Sontag, for instance. [Steve: the voice of the essayist is one of the well-informed writer with an opinion]
[What are the conditions that would make a close reading of your own work possible?]: Peace and quiet, a wall for the work to hang on... [On method…] I sometimes make lists which provide a skeleton for a text; I then connect them or rearrange them so they make the best sense; I need to be able to visualise the text.