[NetBehaviour] Intimations By Cinzia Cremona

[marc garrett]

Intimations by Cinzia Cremona
20th Nov – 2nd Dec 2014
Thurs - Sat, 12 - 6pm (or by appointment)

http://www.arebyte.com/int/4587204778
https://www.facebook.com/events/341880532661632

Cinzia Cremona
20th November – 2nd December 2014

Come in, play, think ...

Intimations includes five videoperformances produced between 2007 and 2013:
1. Regardless (2007) experiments with visual strategies to suggest that 
the screen is permeable. 2. The Other Person (2010) explores intimacy, 
trust and zones of proximity. 3. Wish You Were Here (2011) suggests and 
mocks idealised conviviality, and plays with ideas of liveness. 4. Are 
You Talking to Me? (2010) denies relationality by focusing on a dialogue 
internal to the performer. 5. Before You Now (2013) explores the desire 
for authenticity and unmediated relationality.Th ese videoperformances 
address you directly and ask personal and self-reflective questions. It 
is on you, the viewer, that the significance of Intimations relies. The 
exhibition will be fulfilled if you accept the invitation to answer my 
enquires – otherwise they are simply monologues to camera – screen 
mediated conversations with an imagined other.

There are no technical theatrics, and the DIY aesthetic makes your 
presence feel more real. Dichotomies such as geographical distance and 
visual closeness, and relational presence and physical absence arise. I 
share with you a private moment in which I expose my feelings and 
thoughts. In addition, I unceasingly try to start an impossible dialogue 
with you, which triggers feelings of frustration on both sides of the 
screen. The screen is familiar to us and it is palpable in our daily 
life where most of our communication is now screen-based. We live in a 
networked society of hyper- communication, where the screen become s 
invisible but, at the same time, shapes our identities. Through the 
Internet and within mass communications systems we assemble data 
according to our desires and we construct our personalised hypertext. 
Consequently, there is a fragmentation of our sense of self and 
understanding since I have my text and you have yours.

I address the camera in order to evoke an ideal interlocutor who 
activates a scene of address with me and initiates a chain of relays. We 
mobilise interpellation, the gaze, awareness and performativity to 
produce mediated relationality and invite reflection. These 
videoperformances explore the mechanisms and strategies of interfacing 
performer, video camera and screen to produce and mediate performative 
relationality in videoperformance. As a result, relationality emerges as 
fundamental to the construction of subjectivity.

By performing in my own work, I deploy my subjectivity as a tool to 
offer and experiment with the relational dynamics of performance, of the 
mediation of video, of the specific qualities of the screen and of the 
interplay of subjectivity and relationality. The elements of 
subjectivity that emerge in my videoperformances are part of my personal 
history, and are selected and utilised to activate relational offers and 
strategies. I confront the question of gendered subjectivity and 
representation directly, and acknowledge the legacy of artists and 
thinkers who have focused on the politics of representation of the 
female body (Martha Rosler, Hannah Wilke, Annie Abrahams and Peggy Phelan).

However, these videoperformances aim to integrate and transcend the 
direct questioning of representation towards the activation of 
performative relationality productive of moments of reflection. 
Similarly, they resonate with the theories and discourses of 
interpellation, the gaze, performativity and their ethics. In other 
words, I play with you in a way that transforms us both. I become with 
you, we construc t ways of being and theories on ways of beings. What 
will you do with this experience? Where will you take it?

Cinzia Cremona is an artist and researcher. Her videoperformances 
focusing on relationships and intimate interaction form an original body 
of work that extends into networked practice and on-line performance. 
She is course leader of the MA contemporary Art and Professional 
Practice and for the MA Art, Design and the Book at the Colchester 
School of Art.

Link: http://www.arebyte.com/int/4587204778