Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome audiovisual artist Eva Giolo to UnionDocs to screen and discuss five of her stunning 16mm works, all produced between 2019 and 2023. Using film, video, and installation, Giolo’s work employs experimental and documentary approaches to examine personal and family histories with a focus on women’s experiences. At times combining vibrant 16mm footage with her personal home video archives, these works use gesture, observation, and lyricism to carefully engage questions of domestic fragility, semiotic and linguistic analyses, urban mundanity, intergenerational memory, and corporeal connections with nature.

Giolo’s 2020 film, Flowers blooming in our throats, was nominated for the European Film Award and awarded the Top Prize at THIS IS SHORT 2021, a collaborative online event co-presented by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Vienna Short Film Festival, and other European organizations. She is co-founder of elephy, a production and distribution organization for film and media art, with Rebecca Jane Arthur, Chloë Delanghe, and Christina Stuhlberger.

Following the screening, Giolo will be joined by NYC-based programmer Edo Choi for a conversation during which we’ll delve deeper into the themes embedded in Giolo’s work, from grapplings with permanence and memory to the analysis of language and semiotics.

This is one not to miss, we hope to see you there!

Program

A Tongue Called Mother

18 mins, 2019

A Tongue Called Mother depicts the relationship between language, gestures and affiliation. It slowly captures the actions and words of three generations of women in the same family and children learning to read, meditating on words learnt and forgotten through the body.

Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose

16 mins, 2023

A map – a world – unfolds on a table. We take an audiovisual tour through Brussels, which at the same time forms a cinematic message to Chantal Akerman. Gray morning light reveals parked cars in quiet streets, a swimming pool without visitors, an empty metro platform. We’re taken to places where people spend a gray day: a gymnasium, a museum, a lost and found, a library, a cinema. Like Akerman often appeared on camera in her own films, we see Giolo, resting in a hotel room – the open window subtly lets in the sleeping city. Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose celebrate the passing of time in stillness and movement. Between the sounds and images of the city, silent, surreal scenes with objects are shown in a sky-blue studio: an inflated swimming ring, a red toy car, a still life, a vase, a rolled-up movie screen. An image of a subway corridor is suddenly reminiscent of an empty cinema screen, an open window, and the frame of a painting. The alternating, associative images function as absurd, critical, and poetic comments on everyday life.

Text by Natalie Gielen

Becoming Landscape

20 mins, 2023

A lyrical portrait of Fogo Island in Canada, Becoming Landscape re-situates the viewer in nature, in the activity of watching and waiting, as we meditate on the relationships between our bodies and the landscape, dreaming and looking, consciousness and the circular rhythm of time.

Flowers Blooming in Our Throats

8 mins, 2020

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.

(Text by Leonardo Bigazzi)

Silent Conversations

7 mins, 2023

Hand-processed and self-printed 16mm reversal and negative color films, Silent Conversations is a study of twenty-second sequences of embraces that unfolds as a series of time-based portraits.

Program Duration: 69 mins

Bios

Eva Giolo (b. 1991 in Brussels) is an artist specializing in film, video, and installation. Her work explores the female experience through experimental and documentary techniques, focusing on intimacy, permanence, memory, and language. Her captivating films and installations have been showcased at prestigious venues such as WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, and major film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Vision du Réel.

Edo Choi is a film programmer, critic, and projectionist based in New York City. Since 2019, he has worked at the Museum of the Moving Image as its Associate Curator of Film. His critical writing has been published in Reverse Shot, Film Comment, and other online film journals. He was formerly a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center and has projected at venues in New York City and Chicago.