Bled Out

Six women in Paris traverse the anxiety of the city after dark. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A Black single mother refuses the categories imposed on her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Taking place over a single night, the film intertwines dream, fiction, and reality, liquefying one into the other.

The Italian countryside was once full of fireflies, but now the flickering of far-off headlights pepper the fields as johns go hunting for a one-night mate. In the heat of the night, the reflective glow of other bioluminescent bodies returns the magic of twinkling lights to the darkness.

It’s August. Feel the suffocating heat of the sun penetrating your skin. All around you, an abundance of flesh is spinning. Thousands of men offer up the naked bodies of baby boys to the angelic icon of San Sebastian. Screams, colours, chants and explosions. Money-garlands. Imagine no women except for me. Wait, yes, behind us women are following with devotion, all dressed up in well pressed clothes and their stocking feet. Now, come back here. Imagine how badly I fell in love with this. I desperately want to be part of it. To be there. I wanted to belong. But I know I can’t. And so, I try to capture it on film. I go there and film it every year, over and over, again and again. One day I will tell the story of a poor and sterile man who wants to replace San Sebastian. But more summers will have to pass before our hero appears.

On 12 October 2023, in a performative journey through the urban planning and fascist architecture of EUR and its colonial spectres, the present, the past and a utopian future led the public through a discovery of Via Cristoforo Colombo. EUR is the result of a fascist urban planning system which was meant to inscribe into the city’s road pattern straight trajectories of expansion toward the Mediterranean Sea, as a symbolic representation of the regime’s colonial project. On October 12th, a day celebrated in many countries as Columbus Day, such references were poetically and irreverently subverted by Feel Good Cooperative, as a collective and desiring body of more than one hundred people was guided on a performative journey to re-signify those sites of exploitation and power through a polyphony of voices.

Transcendence and hedonism are two of the inner contradictions we experience in new conceptual constellations in a work dedicated to collective rituals in Europe’s public spaces.