Federica Foglia
Birth : , Napoli, Italy
History
Federica Foglia is a transnational visual artist and writer. She holds a BA in Multimedia Languages and Digital Humanities: History of Art, Theatre, and Cinema from the University of Naples L'Orientale, an MFA in Film from York University, Toronto, and is currently a Ph.D. researcher in Cinema and Media Studies at York University.
She is interested in migration, citizenship and identity, displacement, women of the diaspora, migrant temporalities, and finding a visual language to investigate these experiences.
Her practice revolves around tactile filmmaking, recycled cinema, amateur filmmaking, archives, ecofeminism, and materialist cinema. She works within the domestic space to remediate found-footage movies, via a sculptural approach she intervenes directly on the celluloid body.
Her work engages with the physical qualities of the film medium and the politics of fragmented aesthetics. She is currently working on a project that involves eco-friendly emulsion lifting techniques to remediate 16mm archival films and developing eco-sustainable photographic processes with algae-based materials.
Her works have been exhibited and won awards in several international art galleries and festivals, including Macau Art Garden, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante, BIDEODROMO, Bilbao Arte Foundation, Toronto International Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads San Francisco, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, REAKTOR Wien, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Visions in the Nunnery - Whitechapel UK, Groupe Intervention Vidéo Montreal, SCAD Savannah International Film Festival, ULTRAcinema Festival Mexico, MIMESIS Documentary Festival, Camerimage, Mostra del Cinema di Pesaro, Torino Film Festival, Friche la Belle de Mai.
Her research has been supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and received an MFA nomination from the Graduate Program in Cinema and Media Studies (York University) for the Governor General's Gold Medal. She is also the recipient of the 2017 RBC Arts Access Fund Award for Newcomer Artists in Canada.
Director
Glitter for Girls is a handmade tattoo film that utilizes a cameraless direct-on-film animation approach to craft a collage composed of multiple layers of water tattoos (commonly used by children).
Director
Skyscraper Film is a cameraless handmade film collage created from scraps of 16mm orphan films from the 1970s. Originally produced to promote tourism in North America, these films are remediated by the filmmaker to create an abstract collage via the emulsion lifting/ emulsion grafting technique. Using this method, the filmmaker lifts by hand the emulsion layer from the film strip and subsequently places it on a different film strip. This way a celluloid collage is created, then re-animated.
Director
A mix of 8mm and 16mm home movies, mostly depicting Western women focused on their home lives or leisure time, collected obsessively on eBay auctions, is remedied through various artisanal and eco-friendly techniques. The film follows a woman's chronological evolution from childhood to death and the iconic traditional milestones she hopes to reach in Western Catholic culture: communion, confirmation, marriage, motherhood, housewife, perhaps learning to crochet, and so on. In a strange reversal, none of these moments were experienced by the filmmaker. Ultimately, the disturbance of these images becomes a poetic intervention in which the director's personal experience is intertwined with the cultural heritage of popular iconic images of women in home movies and a reflection on the objects found, and ebay as an unlikely source for counter-file.
Director
Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. The film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of multiple countries and temporalities through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and fragments of otherwise anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called “scraps,” Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life.
Director
This hybrid piece is a collage created assembling both analog and digital material. Several layers of 8mm films merge to create a camera-less self-portrait of the filmmaker. The first layer is an 8mm orphan film (found footage) from the 1970s of a woman dancing. The second layer is an 8mm found footage film that has been buried in earth for some months. While being covered in earth, the film emulsion has been eaten by the bacterias in the ground, plus some bacterias from yeast and sugar. This technique was originally used by the Schmelzdahin group in Germany. After several weeks in soil, the film gets extracted, rinsed, and scanned via a 4K digital scanner. The third layer is an 8mm home movie that has been first decayed in soil, using the aforementioned technique, then hand-painted with ink.
Director
In "Self-Portrait", Federica Foglia (re)constructs her dislocated immigrant identity through the home movies of others, enacting a search for the self and creating a work of striking filmic autopoiesis.
Director
"Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new." - Viktor Shklovsky ***** This short hybrid film departs from the remediation of a low resolution .jpg file. A poor image to bring attention to a poor moment in cinema history.
Director
"Amne Perenne Latens, Anna Perenna Vocor". Hidden in the Eternal Stream, My name is Anna Perenna.
Director
This short piece is an autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and memory film. It explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between past and present, between dream and reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.
Director
In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot "La Taranta". A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering the stories of groups of immigrant women (mostly from Romania) who were victims of agricultural and sexual exploitation in Ragusa, Sicly. I reapprorpiated the 1962 archival footage to propose a different angle of the story surrounding these women. Not from the point of view of a man who has undertaken to observe them, but from the point of view of a woman from the South of Italy. (FF)
Producer
Two young Chinese women draw themselves into an irreconcilable relationship with each other, one in a small town of Southwestern China, and the other in an old apartment of Toronto.
Director of Photography
A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film "plays" with images in a mysterious way. In the words of Eugenio Montale, weaving a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far-away lovers yearning for each other.
Producer
A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film "plays" with images in a mysterious way. In the words of Eugenio Montale, weaving a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far-away lovers yearning for each other.
Director
A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film "plays" with images in a mysterious way. In the words of Eugenio Montale, weaving a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far-away lovers yearning for each other.
Director
Colonna Continua (Continuos Column) is an endless 16mm loop composed of layers of 16mm found footage, 8mm home movies and 35mm collage slides - subsequently scanned on an Optical Printer. The Loop and Slides were first created for a live performance at Pix Film Gallery in Toronto. The film loop is accompanied by slides of colours, fragments of images, words that act as inter-titles, creating echoes between the film's continuous vertical movement and the stillness of the fixed slide. The found sound is a poem written by Italian beat poet Massimo Mori in 1980, from a collection of poetry created between Italy and Quebec, Canada.
Director
We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, warped faces, collapsed homes. While several narrators tell us about the most vivid colors in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. The narration is from the anthology Dreams by Delia Derbyshire. -- F.F.
Director
A train ride through a desolated suburban area. A post-internet visual essay on transition, assimilation and forgiveness. The short consists of layers of 16mm film, found footage, .png files, and internet generated graphics.
Director
11,000 refugees have been stranded for months in the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greek/Macedonian border. This short documentary is a glimpse of their lives in a forgotten twilight zone, as they wait for the European borders to open.
Director
Exit / Entrance is a visual and poetic essay on what it is like to be displaced as a person. The protagonist is a painter who wanders the town in which he lives to sketch and paint oscillating between nostalgia and desire to belong.
