Cait meets third year Elam student Bianca Rocca to discuss writing as part of a contemporary art practice.
Cait: You’re going to be showing a video work on Friday night. Can you tell us what Contact/Looking from a distance is about?
Bianca: I made this video for a project at Elam in second year. It was a self directed brief and I wanted to think about how people deal with memory and archiving online. I started by pulling a bunch of weird, obsessive videos from Youtube-- people walking home, washing fruit, filming their family at the beach. I was thinking about the preservation of relationships that happens online. During that time I was writing about a few difficult relationships I was having, and how I was dealing with their beginnings and endings through onlineness. The video has both of the people that I wrote the final poem about, and me, reading it aloud. It’s cut and chopped and played alongside the found videos.
C: How does writing feature in your artistic practice?
B: At the start of each project I go back through my diaries, and that’s sort of where I pull responses to briefs from. In terms of writing being incorporated into the final work--- Contact was the first time I’ve done that. I write for myself, to process things. If that writing relates to a particular project then that’s great. But I don’t really begin a project and decide I’m going to respond to it with writing.
C: You’re currently writing a script! What kind of project is it for?
B:My work after Contact was also text oriented. I made lots of posters-- it was about feminism. This script that I’m writing is a continuation of that project. I think that in art, text based practice is very powerful but not really…
C: It’s kind of hierarchised.
B: Yeah... You have this separation between art theory and art. I think that disjuncture is illogical because text can be just as abstract as visual arts can be. Often that’s a really direct way of communicating. I decided that for this project, the ideas that I’m dealing with-- which concern problems with white neo-liberal feminism, needed to be dealt with directly because of the audience I’m trying to talk with. This script is hopefully a direct way of doing that. I want to make an essay film using found footage from online, much like Contact.
C:Do you have any influences that you constantly return to?
B: Chris Marker is a major. His film Sans Soleil was a massive influence when I made the video I’ll be showing on Friday. I always reread that monologue and think about how that text functions-- drawing quite obscure connections between concepts.
C:Your writing is often about very specific people-- in this case to the point of actually including the voices of the poem’s subjects. What draws you to this autobiographical kind of writing?
B: With this project, the poem was written only about a week before the deadline. I didn’t have time to fictionalise what was happening. It felt more relevant to the videos I was working with to have the text directly attached to me. I suck at fiction, and I don’t think I can realistically make up characters and events-- it disrupts what I’m trying to say if I attempt to skirt around portraying people that I know. But there are issues around writing about real people because usually I’m writing about my feelings being hurt [laughs]. Often if the people I’m writing about read my work they can feel quite offended or concerned. Contact had some tricky implications for me and the other readers. [laughs] But that’s all learning.
B: With this project, the poem was written only about a week before the deadline. I didn’t have time to fictionalise what was happening. It felt more relevant to the videos I was working with to have the text directly attached to me. I suck at fiction, and I don’t think I can realistically make up characters and events-- it disrupts what I’m trying to say if I attempt to skirt around portraying people that I know. But there are issues around writing about real people because usually I’m writing about my feelings being hurt [laughs]. Often if the people I’m writing about read my work they can feel quite offended or concerned. Contact had some tricky implications for me and the other readers. [laughs] But that’s all learning.
Bianca will be showing her work at All Tomorrow’s Poets on the 26th of August at 6pm.
You can follow her work on Instagram here
Photo by Matt Hunter
