Watch Short Film: Pain in Colour // or: Qualcosa che all’oggetto non s’apprende (Dir. Matthew Griffith)

Originally conceived as a visual translation of a lyric poem by Patrizia Cavalli concerning chronic pain and disability, this video features an intimate and colourful performance incarnating an interpretation of the poem through the gesture of covering oneself with brightly coloured paint, evoking the intimate act of pain relieving self-massage as a way of making invisible disability visible.

Rather than merely displaying the performance for the viewer, whose role would be passive, almost voyeuristic, thereby limiting the exploitation of video as a medium to its infinite repeatability, the performance is fragmented across two screens that are then themselves recorded in video together, effectively reducing a two channel video installation to a single channel.

This is done with the goal of breaking any lingering illusion of realism that the moving image brings with it, requiring a more active role from the viewer as they are forced to look at, rather than look through, the screen, complicating an otherwise voyeuristic spectatorial experience, forcing the attention on the spectator themselves rather than the performer and, intermediately, on the screen itself.

Throughout the video, the sound of a screen unfurling evokes what would otherwise be (had the performance simply been presented documentaristically) a distant and discordant sensorial experience resulting from the act of projection.

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My art practice has formed in conjunction with my scholarly research on emerging forms of literary expression and their relationship to moving image art. I’m most interested in the period from the moment the cinema entered the gallery in the 60s to the pre web 2.0 net.poetry of the 90s, and my research is increasingly focused on the screen itself as a site of projection, proliferation and mediation. This piece in particular is the result of combining these currents of thought with my goal to increase awareness of invisible disability.