FLOWERS BLOOMING IN OUR THROATS

16mm scanned to digital file, 8’ 42”

Courtesy the artist, Fondazione In Between Art Film and Elephy

Commissioned and produced by In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence

EVA GIOLO

Eva Giolo (b. 1991 in Brussels) is a visual artist who uses documentary strategies to explore personal and family histories, through an intense gaze that is keenly attuned to women’s experiences. She often employs 16mm and found footage from home video archives and from her private life.

Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, Flowers blooming in our throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. The artist films a group of her female friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. Giolo chooses to walk a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable. Hands try to support or escape, but also to grip or strike, in a subtle interweaving of sounds and references that adds to the viewer’s sense of tension and unease. A dialogue of gestures, made up of repeated visual sequences where time is marked by the spinning of a small toy top, as unstable and precarious as the balance of a relationship.

The artist repeatedly uses a red filter on her lens, creating a conceptual device that relies on an element of abstraction to conceal and transfigure the image. The mechanical insertion of the filter over the lens thus becomes the simulation of a violent act, immediately changing the way we perceive and remember an action we have seen before.

This coexistence of opposites can also be found in the title, which metaphorically suggests how the beauty of a natural phenomenon—and implicitly, love—can turn into a suffocating force.