The End of All Resistance: Single Channel Video, 29 Minutes, 2010
In this piece, I invited two US army interrogators to teach and role play "emotional interrogation techniques" according to US Army Field Manual 22-2-3.
I then transposed their performance into extended improvisation with two female actors and a married couple in a domestic setting, enacting scenarios based
on the interrogators' demonstrations. The work explores the performance of interrogation as recognizable and similar to the interactions we engage in every day,
and the kinds of performances we use to communicate power.
Clip coming soon.
I Lay Claimto You: Single Channel Video Installation, 6 minutes, 2009
In I Lay Claim to You, I invite choreographer Khalia Frazier to translate a text — appropriating themes from Margaret Mead's 1938 description of a Balinese cremation — into a dance.
In an improvised rehearsal, Frazier and I perform attitudes of identification: claiming and reclaiming ownership of the dancers and of each other. The dancers operate as a Chorus, mediating and transcribing the process.
I conflate tropes of cultural inscription with the situation of a rehearsal to engage difference and sameness as changeable, conditional and contested categories, whose instability is political.
Play Clip: 1:00
Palindrome: 2-channel Video, 45 minutes, 2009
Palindrome is about 2 characters exploring and performing in environments of captivity.
Play Clip: 8:00
Touring, 1972 / 2009 : Original Photographs, Found Photographs and Text, 2009
This piece uses archived and original images to explore historical and contemporary constructions of pleasure and fantasies of escape.
Immigrant Palace: Super 16mm film, Video, Installation, 2009
As Italy grows increasingly bold in its anti-immigration rhetoric and practice (encouraged by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the newly elected Gianni Alemanno, mayor of Rome and former fascist), collaboration across religion and culture becomes a tool with which to approach and examine and appropriate these ideological divides. Collaborating with Redouane Niraoui, a devout Moslem and naturalized Italian citizen of Moroccan descent, we piece together a narrative of his daily religious and private rituals as a resistance to his experience of social alienation in mainstram italian culture.
Play Clip: 5:00
No Man's Land, Video, 2008
No Man's Land centers on the dissonance between seer and seen, writer and actor, translator and inhabitant. The piece explores the
challenges of storytelling in an economically polarized world that is fixed on insider/outsider-based notions of identity and access.
In transcribing the imagined, disengaged experience of an invisible woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, alongside my own tourist narrative,
I make a spectacle of this frustration. This piece seeks to engage the political and intimate frustrations experienced in the search for embodiment.
Temps Mort, Photographs, 2007
A squatter’s building in Biella, Italy was purchased by condominium developers in Fall 2007. Prior to its rehab I interviewed the architect
who was transforming the building into condominiums and spent seven days confined to the building, making photographs in the former
dwellings of the dispossessed inhabitants.
See all images
Room 101: Single Channel Split Screen Video (1 Hour) /Performance (10 Hours), 2007
During an artist’s residency in Italy in 2007, I asked ten participants each to spend one hour alone in a white room while being filmed,
while I performed the part of an ambiguous “attendant” waiting outside in constructed set resembling an office space, monitoring the
participants and listening to Fox News Radio for the ten consecutive hours of the project. This piece was made in collaboration with Zorka Wollny.
Play Clip: 2:30
The Official: 3-Channel Video Installation, 2007
Shot in the United Nations in New York, what first appears to be an interview conducted with a diplomat by an unnamed interviewer
shifts into a fractured narrative. The characters use uncertain games, gestures of control and attitudes of intimacy to suggest larger cultural
tensions and ambiguities.
To see a clip from this installation, please contact Chelsea Knight directly.
When the Moon is Full, Video, 2007
A series of conversations with my Italian-American grandparents combine to create a dissonant, collective narrative about
memory, invention and loss.
Small Fantasies, 2-Channel Video installation, 2006
My mother and father perform their respective deaths, with my stage directions.
Play Clip: 1:00
Standing on the Beach in Rimini, 2-Channel Video Installation, 2006
This piece is a series of memories recounted by a tourist or traveler in her second language. Each “memory” contains an element of personal or cultural estrangement. This work combines the nostalgic, murky vision of the traveler with the conspicuous invisibility of the migrants, immigrants and displaced populations around her.
More information on individual works coming soon.