Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

“U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (2022), presented as a video installation at 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, reimagines the Sicilian, queer, multispecies myth of the "donne di fora" (“women from the outside and beside themselves”). Described as both magical and criminal, the "donne di fora" were said to possess both the feminine and masculine; the human and the animal; the benevolent and the vengeful. This film envisions the "donne di fora" as a gang of teenage “tuners” who ride through the utopian city of Gibellina Nuova (Sicily) on bikes customized with disruptive sound systems. The narrative voyage of the “tuners” is interspersed with poetic text and visual motifs from a 19th century collection of Sicilian fairy tales, Giardina Papa’s fragmented childhood memories of songs and stories told by her grandmother, and archival material from the Inquisition trials of the 16th and 17th centuries that criminalized women accused of being a "donne di fora". “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale repurposes the magical, ritualistic, and unruly as forces that generate an imagination beyond predetermined categories of humanness, chronological time, and mythological womanhood.

Elisa Giardina Papa’s research-based practice investigates the performance of gender, sexuality, and labor. Working across large scale video installations, drawings, sculptures, and theoretical texts, she documents how past and present forms of capitalism have extracted our capacities for labor and living—including sleep, intimacy, and emotion. With witty and poetic framing, her work calls attention to those parts of our lives, desires, and embodiments that remain radically unruly, untranslatable, and incomputable. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (The Milk of Dreams), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA’s Modern Mondays), the Whitney Museum (Sunrise/Sunset Commission), Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, Flaherty NYC, UnionDocs, and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), among others. Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in film, media, and gender studies at the University of California Berkeley. She lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily. Elisa Giardina Papa is also a founding member of the artist collective Radha May. Together with Bathsheba Okwenje and Nupur Mathur, they develop performances and art installations that reveal forgotten archives, hidden histories, and peripheral sites, exploring their relation to gender, and colonialism.