The Following Scenes will be Deleted: Censorship and Content Moderation in Cinema and Social Media will showcase a performance and talk by Radha May and Elisa Giardina Papa on censorship and spectatorship in cinema and on the internet . This program is organized by Mathilde Walker-Billaud and is a part of her ongoing series on spectatorship What You Get Is What You See.

Radha May presents, for the first time in New York, When The Towel Drops – a performance on the cinema censorship of female pleasure and sexuality. The artists unveil scenes that were removed from publicly viewed cinema in Italy during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and that have been, until now, kept hidden from sight in the Italian National Cinema Archive. With scenes from films such as Brink of Life by Ingmar Bergman and La Notte by Michelangelo Antonioni, Radha May enacts a collective reading of the official justifications that motivated the acts of censorship.

The performance will be followed by a presentation on the legal shifts and peculiarities that distinguish cinema censorship from current new media content moderation. The artists will look at shared conventions of in/visibility that determine what is seen and what is not. They will explore the transition of censorship from a state enforced ideological agenda to a set of corporate social media policies.

This mixed-media presentation will be followed by a conversation between Elisa Giardina Papa and curator Mathilde Walker-Billaud, who will open up a dialogue around the question of censorship, interrogating contemporary practices on social media, content moderation, trolling and users’ self-regulation. This second part of the evening will include the screening Elisa Giardina Papa’s short video work Need ideas!?!PLZ!!.

When The Towel Drops is an ongoing art project by Radha May that investigates the censored representation of women, femininity, and sexuality in international cinema and on the Internet. The performance When The Towel Drops Vol.1 I Italy specifically explores gender and cinema censorship in second postwar Italy.

Need ideas!?!PLZ!  is a collage of YouTube films in which American teenagers and students ask YouTube for ideas for a video—a paradoxical response to the need to live online imposed by systems based on user-generated content.

Elisa Giardina Papa is an Italian artist whose work investigates labor, gender and sexuality in relation to media cultures and economies. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the MoMA (New York), XVI Quadriennale di Roma, rhizome.org [Download commission], Whitney Museum [Sunrise/Sunset commission], Haus für elektronische Künste (Basel), 319 Scholes (New York), among others. She taught at Brown University, and at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently pursuing a PhD in media and film studies at University of California Berkeley. Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD, and a BA from Politecnico of Milan. She lives and works in Berkeley and Sicily.

Radha May is an artist whose work explores forgotten and hidden histories, peripheral sites, and feminine myths. Her projects begin with an investigation of things she does not understand but wants to bring closer to her. She uses tools borrowed from anthropologists, historians and journalists to conduct her research. She works in the field, meticulously sifting through historical and digital archives making what she finds available to anybody; she also distills the material into fictional and surreal scenarios that complicate assumptions about history, borders and cultural and social formations.

Radha May is Elisa Giardina Papa, Nupur Mathur and Bathsheba Okwenje. She comes from Sicily, New Delhi and Kampala.

What You Get Is What You See is a forum about the way we spectate.

In a world saturated with information, images and noises, where the frontiers between fact and fiction are blurring, we hope to offer a critical space where we can discuss the exhibition and hyper-dramatization of reality.

Focusing more on the process than the product, the program investigates the role of spectatorship in creative practice. UnionDocs invites filmmakers, artists and writers to share their personal observations as viewers, readers, watchers, listeners and audience members. Using their trained gaze and acute sensitivity, the guests will expose reception as an everyday dynamic act.

This presentation is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ 2017 Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds Grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.