Director Biography – Federica Foglia
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. student 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 art spaces 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 MACA, BIDEODROMO, BilbaoArte Foundation, Toronto International Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads San Francisco, 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.
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.
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 art spaces 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 MACA, BIDEODROMO, BilbaoArte Foundation, Toronto International Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads San Francisco, 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.
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.
SYNOPSIS
Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element?
Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement?
Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else?
Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves?
Can I melt skyscrapers?
Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc.
Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage, created from scraps of orphan 16mm films from the 1980s. Originally produced to promote tourism in North America, these films are reassigned to a new context through the Emulsion Lifting/Emulsion Grafting technique that the director has been pursuing for years. In addition to tourism films and informational films, Skyscraper Film also uses rare family films and home-movies dating back to 1929 and 1954 in 16mm format.
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More on the Emulsion Lifting technique: https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=library-research
Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement?
Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else?
Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves?
Can I melt skyscrapers?
Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc.
Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage, created from scraps of orphan 16mm films from the 1980s. Originally produced to promote tourism in North America, these films are reassigned to a new context through the Emulsion Lifting/Emulsion Grafting technique that the director has been pursuing for years. In addition to tourism films and informational films, Skyscraper Film also uses rare family films and home-movies dating back to 1929 and 1954 in 16mm format.
________
More on the Emulsion Lifting technique: https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=library-research