FLOWERS BLOOMING IN OUR THROATS

Synopsis

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)

Biography

Eva Giolo is an artist working across film, video, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at Sadie Coles HQ in London, WIELS in Brussels, MAXXI in Rome, GEM in the Hague, BOZAR in Brussels, M HKA in Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and major film festivals like Rotterdam, Viennale, FIDMarseille, Cinéma du Réel. She is a founding member of the production and distribution platform elephy.

FILMOGRAPHY:
2020 - FLOWERS BLOOMING IN OUR THROATS
2019 - STUDY OF GESTURES_01
2019 - THE TASTE OF TANGERINES
2019 - A TONGUE CALLED MOTHER
2018 - ELISABETH
2016 - GIL
2016 - REMOTE
2014 - SHATTERED