Valentina Furian
∗1989, Italy
Valentina Furian makes use of film, performance and photography to investigate the relationship between reality and fiction, humanity and nature as well as interspecies relationships, especially those with animals. In her films, she dwells in particular on the process of domestication of the animals that are the protagonists of her moving images, on the one hand recounting the abandonment of the wilderness, and on the other the assertion of human dominance over nature.In her video55(2019), for instance, the artist aims her lens at a dog barking and growling at something burning off screen. Thanks to the light of the flames, we can make out the white fangs of the animal, distressed by fire – a key human tool – and its desperate and incessant barking places the viewer in the same state of anguish. Produced in Buenos Aires with the support of Fundación PROA and presented for the first time atThe Parliament of Marmots, the video on show focuses on the mythological figure of the centaur: a creature that hybridises the body of a horse with the torso of a human being. The camera lens focuses on the nervous, restrained movements of the tamed animal: its muscles clench and itsjoints flex. The screen, suspended from the ground, allows viewing from both sides, thus including the audience in the image and making them part of the hybrid state, between reality and fiction, between the human and the animal. The statuesque, out-of-scale body of the animal becomes an abstraction, an epidermal landscape, a moving mountain that floats without ever resting on the ground.
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