Eva Giolo

Flowers blooming in our throats

Edition 2021

Courtisane: Selection

9' - 2020

Director: Eva Giolo

Courtisane

Flowers blooming in our throats is a cinematic poem in response to the worldwide pandemic of 2020.

Everyday occupations, some domestic tools, fruits, light, rope and many hands. Hands that dig in the earth, that cut, that cook, that touch, rip, wash, squeeze, erase, press, push. The sound of domestic spaces and its silence. Red flowers one summer. Flowers blooming in our throats is a cinematic poem in response to the worldwide pandemic of 2020.

In the presence of Eva Giolo

Commissioned and produced by in between art films for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence

Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, Flowers blooming in our throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. The artist films a group of her friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. Giolo chooses to walk a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable. Hands try to support or escape, but also to grip or strike, in a subtle interweaving of sounds and references that adds to the viewer’s sense of tension and unease. A dialogue of gestures, made up of repeated visual sequences where time is marked by the spinning of a small toy top, as unstable and precarious as the balance of a relationship.The artist repeatedly uses a red filter on her lens, creating a conceptual device that relies on an element of abstraction to conceal and transfigure the image. The mechanical insertion of the filter over the lens thus becomes the simulation of a violent act, immediately changing the way we perceive and remember an action we have seen before.This coexistence of opposites can also be found in the title, which metaphorically suggests how the beauty of a natural phenomenon—and implicitly, love – can turn into a suffocating force. (Leonardo Bigazzi)