Cristina Lavosi

Focusing on the self-narration and visual language of the mounted police, ‘A horse is a horse of course of course’ reflects on how police horses are treated as just another of the many apparatuses police use for the maintenance of social control systems and their legitimation. While undergoing a special domestication process aimed at suppressing their instinctive flight responses to fear, horses become a means to impose disciplinary power in return. Originally a two-channel video, ‘A horse is a horse of course of course’ invites us to question the distorted mainstream cultural definition of policing. To start engaging with an abolitionist practice also requires radically decoding and refusing the oversimplifying language that police speak.

Ear Twist is based on real and imagined conversations with the filmmakers mother, complicating the relationship. Through a reenactment of the mother-daughter roles, two performers talk themselves into an unpredictable psychological game where they constantly negotiate for power. By re-staging power dynamics, the work exposes the fragility of the roles we play.

Getting inside the head of an ox’ is a visual essay investigating the instruments and behaviours human developed to closely look at nature and animal life, shaping their own bodies in order to blend in or reproduce nature – be it for amateurish practice, scientific or political purposes. The narration departs from a book titled ‘Wild Nature’s Way’ by the Kearton brothers – two British naturalists and pioneers in wildlife photographers – but it expands to diverse related subjects. It raises questions on basic but yet extremely contemporary human behaviour: the ongoing urge to observe, record and study, in order to control and conquer. Our relationship with animals evolves, and becomes increasingly complex in this era of rapid technological changes

The film explores the ‘Farfallino’ language, a coded versionof Italian used by children to secretly communicate between each other. In Italian, literally, farfallino means "language of butterflies", from the animal’s noun farfalla. The work starts from the proposition of a unintelligible communication capable of transpassing species through incomprehension. While employing mechanism of exclusion and inclusion, languages creates separatisms and possible alliances.