“I can hear you now – Emotional response” ©Dayana Marconi 2017. Copyright for this video belongs solely to Dayana Marconi. Images may not be downloaded without her permission.
In the creation of the project “I can hear you now”, I usually portray people during an emotional process of internalization of their negative feelings or memories, then externalised through the act of screaming to, at the end of that emotional path, visually analyse “what is left”. This to transform an act, commonly conceived as negative (screaming) into something with more positive connotations and to allow those individuals that I photograph to release that negativity that chain them up to their past.
Since my aim it to generate and enhance empathy in the observer, with this video, I decided to start examining viewers’ reaction to my work.
In this specific case, I filmed a woman, who’s previously been also one of my sitters, while watching my “Video self-portrait” immerse into the dark. The only light was provided by the projection on her face and body of a series of long-exposure photographs of screams I have created for my project.
She couldn’t see what I was projecting on her, being completely unaware of the visual final result, she could only see that video. That beaming was intentionally distorted to focus viewers’ attention of her face and on her facial micro-expressions in order to allow the audience to understand what she was experiencing and, again, to empathise with her.
Those photographs meant to seem as painted on her, in some cases almost embracing her figure, and her shadow became a projection into a projection, turning her into an integral part of the work itself, “playing” with multiple layers of meaning.
The only sounds and noises we can hear are the ones generated by my “Video self-portrait”, by the subject breathing that, at some point, became almost synchronised with mine and the environmental ones.
I asked my sitter not to physically move as far as possible, trapping and forcing her to face what she was looking at, increasing and exasperating her “position” into this experiment. There was no “rehearsal”, she had only one chance to watch my video while being filmed: the reaction had to be absolutely and completely authentic.
Since at the end of that “Video self-portrait” my body completely disappeared from the frame, I decided to do something similar while filming her by hiding her face into a shadow recreated by one of her photographs. In this way only the movement of her chest was completely visible but, at the same time, she was silently screaming with me and for me.
My intention was to detect and analyse all her reactions and to understand how a potential audience might experience my work, hoping that this visual experiment might work as empathy’s catalyst.
Hereafter, my “Video sel-portrait” in order to watch what my sitter was observing during the filming phase:
“I can hear you now – Video self-portrait” ©Dayana Marconi 2017. Copyright for this video belongs solely to Dayana Marconi. Images may not be downloaded without her permission.
References:
Marconi Dayana, Vimeo Channel https://vimeo.com/dayanamarconi
Dayana Marconi CRJ 