The Demands of Ordinary Devotion

A group of women perform small actions following the artist's instructions that can become a simulation of a violent act. The film is part of the program Mascarilla 19 commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film.

The curators invited a group of artists to be inspired by the work of the well-known, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. They specifically presented them News from Home, the 1976 feature film with two equal main characters: the island of Manhattan, New York where the director resides and her mother in Brussels who, through a stream of letters, demands increasingly urgent news.

The film transports to a landscape of silence and solitude, alone with the wind, eyes burnt by the light. A place that turns harshness into tenderness. Although television and smartphones help to distract from the monotonous life in a secluded country village, the sense of community and place prevails.

Hand-processed and self-printed 16mm reversal and negative colour films, Silent Conversations is a study of twenty-second sequences of embraces that unfolds as a series of time-based portraits.

A portrait of Fogo Island, off the Eastern coast of Canada. Giolo approaches the unique environment of the island – human, geological, floral – proposing an indivisibility between landscapes and the bodies that inhabit them. Shot in her distinctly frontal style, a series of 16mm tableaux hint to the relationship between observation and composition, between seeing and dreaming. As someone reads, “a landscape is a state of mind”, or more accurately a “state of mind is a landscape".

Eva Giolo explores the subjective experience of listening as it unfolds through repetition and duration. Through intimate portrayals of the filmmaker’s friends immersed in acts of listening, the camera captures subtle shifts in expression and perception – quite beautifully on 16mm.

Elisabeth HD video, colour, 16:9, stereo, French spoken, English subtitles, 2017.

Shattered is a 10-minute-long short movie about the emotional life of her grandmother suffering from Alzheimer. In this movie, the spectator wanders in a silent and desolated house sheltering fragments of an old woman’s life, a woman of lost words and confused gestures. Tenderness and despair.

At the core of this film, collage is the artist’s search for the face of her deceased twin brother, who died without leaving behind any photographic record. Using archive footages and her own home movies, paradoxically his absence is rendered perceptible through a profusion of images. An indirect portrait is the confirmation of existence.

Miniatures explore the notion of domestic spaces and memory through the filmmaker’s family archive. A legacy of 15 years of Super8 and VHS that documents the family’s history and daily life. A cross-portrait of three generations and their very own experiences of reverie and memory.

Eva Giolo’s latest work takes us to Val Gardena, where people still speak Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language. Giolo subverts the usual representation of mountain communities to deliver a portrait of a precious cultural heritage in constant evolution. Here, the inhabitants preserve and nurture their culture for future generations with awareness of the world and creativity. Shot on 16mm film sensitive to the grandeur and fragility of nature, Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths is an exquisite essay on the vital importance of linguistic diversity. Made in Ladin language.

A choreographed self-portrait of the artist in her apartment in Brussels. Meditating on ideologies of work, she explores notions of exhaustion, resistance and personal healing.

BE GOOD, IF YOU CAN’T BE GOOD, BE GOOD AT IT Boom Boom Boom Boom is a publication composed of letters, notes, anecdotes, translations, stills and images: all traces of the creative process. The artists Rebecca Jane Arthur and Eva Giolo bring together their correspondence on the act of writing and of filmmaking, in all its complexity, struggles and playfulness. The letters unpack themes such as the challenge of making personal work and the strength found in sharing vulnerability; the act of writing itself, language and translation; writing on moving images, on their practices and that of others; and the notion of a place as a container of memories, of interiority and the confrontation with home. The publication uses words and texts as images, and all images of persons or things are hidden. The publication acts as a negative to the films that we create, revealing that which cannot be

A Tongue Called Mother depicts the relationship between language, gestures and affiliation. It slowly captures the actions and words of three generations of women in the same family and children learning to read, meditating on words learnt and forgotten through the body.

Study of gestures_01 is a video loop on a TV monitor. Two hands fold meticulously and gently caress a shirt. An exploration of cultural heritage, traces and resurgences through gestures. The evocations of body memory, conscious or unconscious.