Catalogue > At random

Everyday occupations, some domestic tools, fruits, light, rope and many hands. Hands that dig in the earth, that cut, that cook, that touch, rip, wash, squeeze, erase, press, push. The sound of domestic spaces and its silence. Red flowers one summer. Flowers blooming in our throat is a cinematic poem in response to the worldwide pandemic of 2020. Commissioned and produced by in between art films for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence. 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. Leonardo Bigazzi

Eva Giolo (Belgium) is an audio-visual artist working in film, video, and installation, born in Brussels in 1991. Her work places particular focus on the female experience, employing experimental and documentary strategies to explore themes of intimacy, permanence and memory, along with the analysis of language and semiotics. Giolo uses her camera to capture the “mundane” moments of the everyday to reveal their hidden depth. After pursuing music at East London University (2011), she received her BA in Media Arts (2015), and MA in Fine Arts, Royal Academy Fine Arts Ghent (2016). Her films, installations and other projects have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries internationally, including Sadie Coles HQ, WIELS, MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata Buenos Aires, Viennale, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Lago Film Festival, Viennale, FIDMarseille, Courtisane Film Festival, Rencontres International Paris Berlin, Cinéma du Réel and Punto de Vista among others. Giolo’s work is in the permanent collections of Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome) and Het Huis Van Alijn (Ghent), Museum M (Leuven). Her film Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (2020) was nominated for the European Film Awards (2020), and received Grand Prize from This Is Short, a collaborative online event co-presented by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Vienna Short Film Festival, and other European organizations. She is the recipient of a VAF Wildcard Prize (2016), the Cedric Willemen Award (2019) and special recognition from the Vordemberge – Gildewart Foundation (2020). She was an artist in residence at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (2018–2020), SeMA NANJI in Korea and WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art (2020) and the CASTRO studio program (2021). In 2022, Eva will be an art resident at Fogo Island Arts in Canada. Eva is co-founder of the Moving Image Atelier (Belgium) and co-founder and Artistic Director of Elephy, a production and distribution organization for film and media art, with Rebecca Jane Arthur, Chloë Delanghe, and Christina Stuhlberger. She lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.